past online study sessions
Stephen children in the 1890s
First Woolf Season, October 2020-June 2021
Saturday 24 October 2020, 6 pm The Voyage Out (1915): Packing for the Journey, with Alison Hennegan. SOLD OUT
Saturday 14 November 2020, 10 am The Voyage Out: Packing for the Journey,* repeat session with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 21 November 2020, 6 pm Night and Day (1919): Tea and Tradition, with Ellie Mitchell
Saturday 5 December 2020, 6 pm Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, and Politics, with Peter Jones
Saturday 12 December 2020, 10 am Jacob’s Room (1922), with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 12 December 2020, 6 pm Jacob’s Room* (1922), repeat session, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 19 December 2020, 6 pm Kabe Wilson, On Being Still
Saturday 9 January 2021, 6 pm Mrs Dalloway (1925) 1: Women in Mrs Dalloway, with Trudi Tate. SOLD OUT
Sunday 10 January 2021, 10 am Mrs Dalloway (1925) 1: Women in Mrs Dalloway* repeat session, with Trudi Tate
Saturday 16 January 2021, 6 pm Mrs Dalloway (1925) 2: The Landscape of Memory, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 30 January 2021, 6 pm Mrs Dalloway (1925) 3: Dressing Mrs Dalloway, with Claire Nicholson. SOLD OUT
Saturday 13 February 2021, 6 pm To the Lighthouse (1927) 1: Art, with Claudia Tobin. SOLD OUT. To be repeated 16 May.
Sunday 14 February 2021, 10 am To the Lighthouse (1927) 2: Gardens, with Trudi Tate
Saturday 20 February 2021, 10 am Orlando (1928): Writing Vita, Writing Life, with Karina Jakubowicz
Sunday 21 February 2021, 6pm To the Lighthouse (1927) 2: Gardens* repeat session, with Trudi Tate
Saturday 27 February 2021, 6 pm Orlando (1928): Writing Vita, Writing Life* repeat session, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 6 March 2021, 6 pm A Room of One’s Own (1929) 1: Androgyny, with Alison Hennegan. SOLD OUT
Saturday 13 March 2021, 6 pm A Room of One’s Own (1929) 2: Women, with Trudi Tate. SOLD OUT
Sunday 14 March 2021, 10 am A Room of One’s Own (1929) 2: Women,* repeat session with Trudi Tate
Sunday 21 March 2021, 6 pm Music in The Waves (1931), with Emma Sutton
Saturday 3 April 2021, 6 pm The Waves (1931): Percival with Ellie Mitchell
Sunday 4 April 2021, 10 am The Waves (1931): Friendship with Trudi Tate
Saturday 10 April 2021, 6 pm Flush: A Biography (1933), with Alison Hennegan
Sunday 11 April 2021, 6 pm The Waves (1931): Gardens with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 24 April 2021, 6 pm Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime, with Dame Gillian Beer*. Live repeat session. SOLD OUT
Sunday 2 May 2021, 6 pm The Years (1937), with Anna Snaith
Saturday 8 May 2021, 6 pm Three Guineas (1938) and Music, with Claire Davison
Sunday 16 May 2021, 6 pm To the Lighthouse (1927) 1: Art* repeat session with Claudia Tobin.
Saturday 29 May 2021, 6 pm Between the Acts (1941) 1: Costume, with Claire Nicholson
Sunday 30 May 2021, 6 pm Music in The Waves (1931)*, repeat session with Emma Sutton and Jeremy Thurlow
Saturday 5 June 2021, 10 am Between the Acts (1941) 2: Dispersed are We, with Karina Jakubowicz
Second Woolf Season, October 2021–June 2022
Sunday 3 October 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Empire: India in Mrs Dalloway (1927), with Trudi Tate
Sunday 24 October 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Shakespeare: A Room of One’s Own (1929), with Varsha Panjwani
Sunday 7 November 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Colour: To the Lighthouse (1927), with Claudia Tobin
Sunday 28 November 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Character: The Diary, with Ellie Mitchell
Saturday 4 December 2021, 6 pm Woolf and the Victorians: Tennyson in To the Lighthouse (1927), with Trudi Tate
Sunday 12 December 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Landscape: The Voyage Out (1915), with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 18 December 2021, 6 pm Woolf and Theatre: Freshwater, with Ellie Mitchell
Saturday 8 January 2022, 6 pm Woolf and Space: Night and Day (1919), with Karina Jakubowicz
Wednesday 12 Janurary 2022, 2 pm Woolf and Empire: India in Mrs Dalloway (1927), with Trudi Tate. Live repeat session.*
Sunday 16 January 2022, 6 pm Music and Empire in The Voyage Out (1915), with Emma Sutton
Saturday 5 February 2022, 6 pm Woolf and Newspapers: The Years (1937), with Trudi Tate
Saturday 19 February 2022, 6 pm Friendship in The Waves (1931), with Trudi Tate. Live repeat session.*
Sunday 20 March 2022, 10 am Woolf and Food: A Room of One’s Own (1929), with Nanette O’Brien (note new date)
Saturday 26 March 2022, 6 pm Tea and Tradition: Night and Day (1919), with Ellie Mitchell. Live repeat session.*
Saturday 9 April 2022, 6 pm Books and Libraries in Three Guineas (1938), with Claire Davison
Sunday 10 April 2022, 6 pm Woolf and Androgyny: A Room of One’s Own (1929), with Alison Hennegan. Live repeat session.*
Sunday 8 May 2022, 6 pm Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell, with Mark Hussey
Third Virginia Woolf Season: Woolf and Love, Oct. 2022-June2023
Our third Woolf Season has the theme of Woolf and Love. We explore some of the many kinds of love in her novels: love between women, among friends, in marriage. We explore love and its failure within families; we study love of houses, history, and clothing. Are these all ‘love’? What does this mean? And how does Woolf negotiate the relationship between love and hatred in relationships? We will consider all of these questions and more across 10 lectures, studying 6 Woolf novels and several short stories.
Sessions start in October 2022 and will run until June 2023. All these lectures are newly written for this Season. All are live online via Zoom.
Sunday 9 October 2022, 6 pm Orlando (1928) and Sapphic Love, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 19 November 2022, 6 pm Love and Mourning in To the Lighthouse (1927), with Trudi Tate
Saturday 3 December 2022, 6 pm Between the Acts (1941): For Love of Historical Pageants, with Parker Gordon
Sunday 11 December 2022, 6 pm Languages of Love in The Waves (1931), with Ellie Mitchell
Sunday 22 January 2023, 6 pm Women in Love: Mrs Dalloway (1925), with Trudi Tate
Saturday 18 February 2023, 6 pm Love and Freedom in The Years (1937), with Trudi Tate
Saturday 25 March 2023, 6 pm Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield: Love and Friendship, with Claire Davison
Saturday 22 April 2023, 6 pm Love of Legacy: Orlando (1928), with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 6 May 2023, 6 pm Virginia Woolf’s Love of Clothing: Mrs Dalloway (1925), with Claire Nicholson
Sunday 4 June 2023, 6 pm Mrs Dalloway: Life and Love of the Party, with Ellie Mitchell. SOLD OUT.
You can book any session individually, or book for all 10 sessions for the price of 9. (Update 10 October 2022. Now the Season has started, this option is no longer available.)
Woolf in August 2023: live online lectures and seminars
This August, we repeat some lectures from previous seasons, in case you missed them. These are at 10 am and 12 noon British Summer Time, to allow people in Japanese and Australian time zones to attend live. Lectures will be recorded and available for 48 hours after the live event.
Sunday 6 August 2023, 10 am. Women in Mrs Dalloway (1925) with Trudi Tate
Wednesday 16 August 2023, 12 noon. Woolf and Empire: India in Mrs Dalloway (1925) with Trudi Tate
Wednesday 23 August 2023, 12 noon. Love and Mourning in To the Lighthouse (1927) with Trudi Tate
Sunday 3 Sept 2023, 10 am. A Room of One’s Own (1929): After the First World War with Trudi Tate.
FOURTH WOOLF SEASON 2023-24: Woolf and Freedom
• Saturday 9 September 2023. Lecture 1. Freedom and the Woman Novelist in The Voyage Out (1915), with Karina Jakubowicz.
• Sunday 22 October 2023. Lecture 2. War Trauma and Loss of Freedom in Mrs Dalloway (1925), with Trudi Tate. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 11 November 2023. Lecture 3. Women and Freedom in To the Lighthouse (1927), with Alison Hennegan. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 9 December 2023. Lecture 4. Women’s Freedoms through The Years (1937), with Ellie Mitchell.
• Saturday 6 January 2024. Lecture 5. To the Lighthouse (1927), Art and the Freedom of Movement, with Kabe Wilson. SOLD OUT.
• Sunday 4 February 2024. Lecture 6. A Room of One’s Own (1929): Intelligence and Intellectual Freedom, with Natasha Periyan. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 23 March 2024. Lecture 7. Shakespeare’s Sister and Creative Freedom in A Room of One’s Own (1929), with Varsha Panjwani. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 6 April 2024. Lecture 8. Freedom of Thought in Woolf’s Essays, with Beth Rigel Daugherty. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 4 May 2024. Lecture 9. Freedom of The Waves (1931), with Angela Harris. SOLD OUT.
• Saturday 8 June 2024. Lecture 10. ‘The Essence of Freedom’ in Three Guineas (1938), with Claire Davison.
Online Study Sessions, from 9 May 2020
Saturday 9 May 2020: Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Mother in the Garden, with Trudi Tate SOLD OUT
Sunday 10 May 2020: Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Repeat session)
Sunday 17 May 2020: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 1: After the War, with Trudi Tate
Sunday 24 May 2020: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway: Peace and Betrayal 1923, with Trudi Tate SOLD OUT
Saturday 30 May 2020: Woolf, Mrs Dalloway: Peace and Betrayal 1923 SOLD OUT
Saturday 6 June 2020: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 2: Women and Education, with Alison Hennegan. SOLD OUT
Saturday 13 June 2020: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 20 June 2020: Woolf, The Waves 1: An Introduction to The Waves, with Trudi Tate
Saturday 27 June 2020: Woolf, The Waves 2: Six Characters in Search of a Self, with Alison Hennegan
Sunday 28 June 2020: Katherine Mansfield: The Drama of Being a Child, with Trudi Tate SOLD OUT
Saturday 4 July 2020, 6.00 pm: Forster, A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread, with Alison Hennegan
Sunday 5 July 2020, 10.00 am: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 1: After the War (10.00 am), with Trudi Tate
Saturday 11 July 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 3: Space, with Karina Jakubowicz
Sunday 12 July 2020, 10.00 am: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 3: Space, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 18 July 2020, 10.00 am: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own 2: Women and Education, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 25 July 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, Between the Acts and Gardens, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 1 August 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, Orlando 1: Property, with Karina Jakubowicz
Sunday 2 August 2020, 10.00 am: Woolf, Orlando 1: Property, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 8 August 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, Night and Day, with Ellie Mitchell
Saturday 15 August 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, The Voyage Out, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 22 August 2020, 6.00 pm: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, with Karina Jakubowicz SOLD OUT
Saturday 5 September 2020, 6.00 pm: Katherine Mansfield: The Drama of Being a Child, with Trudi Tate
Sunday 6 September 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, Orlando 2: Clothing, with Claire Nicholson
Saturday 12 September 2020, 6.00 pm: Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime, with Dame Gillian Beer. SOLD OUT
Saturday 19 September 2020, 6.00 pm: Elizabeth von Arnim and Virginia Woolf, with Isobel Maddison
Saturday 26 September 2020, 6.00 pm: Woolf, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’, with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 17 October 2020, 6.00 pm: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, with Clare Walker Gore
Saturday 31 October 2020, 6.00 pm: Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde: A Queer Romance, with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 7 November 2020, 6.00 pm: Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet? with Alison Hennegan
Saturday 14 November 2020, 6.00 pm: Dickens, David Copperfield, with Corinna Russell
Saturday 28 November 2020, 6.00 pm: Shakespeare, King Lear, with Adrian Poole
Sunday 13 December 2020, 10.00 am: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (repeat), with Karina Jakubowicz
Saturday 26 December 2020, 6.00 pm: Writing about Home: Contemporary Refugee Writers, with Trudi Tate. Income from this session was donated to 2 UK refugee charities: Freedom from Torture and Gatwick Detainees Support Group.
Saturday 23 January 2021, 6.00 pm: Toni Morrison, Beloved, with Kasia Boddy and Trudi Tate. SOLD OUT
Saturday 6 February 2021, 6.00 pm: Katherine Mansfield: Stories in Music, with Claire Davison.
Saturday 20 February 2021, 6.00 pm: Dickens, Bleak House, with Corinna Russell
Saturday 20 March 2021, 6.00 pm: D. H. Lawrence, Nature Poetry, with Hugh Stevens
Saturday 27 March 2021, 6.00 pm: Shakespeare, Hamlet, with Adrian Poole. SOLD OUT
Saturday 22 May 2021, 6.00 pm: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, with Ildiko Csengei
Saturday 12 June 2021, 6.00 pm: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India: Ends of Empire, with Peter Jones
Wednesday 21 July 2021, 2.00 pm. Women in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, with Trudi Tate
Wednesday 4 August 2021, 2.00 pm. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber, with Karina Jakubowicz
Wednesday 18 August 2021, 2.00 pm. An Introduction to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, with Trudi Tate
Wednesday 25 August 2021, 2.00 pm. Katherine Mansfield and the Drama of Being a Child, with Trudi Tate
Sunday 26 September 2021, 6.00 pm. Iris Murdoch, The Bell, with Miles Leeson
Saturday 30 October 2021, 6.00 pm. George Eliot, Middlemarch, with Corinna Russell
Sunday 31 October 2021, 6.00 pm. Ivor Gurney, Life and Poetry, with Kate Kennedy
Saturday 20 November 2021, 6.00 pm. George Orwell, 1984, with Karina Jakubowicz
Sunday 21 November 2021, 6.00 pm. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with Hugh Stevens
Saturday 27 November 2021, 6.00 pm. Who’s Who in Richard III, with Adrian Poole
Sunday 5 December 2021, 6.00 pm. Gillian Beer, Stations Without Signs. Gillian read from her new memoir
Sunday 26 December 2021, 6.00 pm. Refugee Writings, with Trudi Tate. Income from this session was donated to UK refugee charities
Saturday 12 February 2022, 6.00 pm. Shakespeare, Othello, with Scott Annett
Saturday 26 February 2022, 6.00 pm. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, with Corinna Russell
Wednesday 18 May 2022, 2.00 pm. Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other, with Joseph Steinberg
Saturday 28 May 2022, 6.00 pm. Dialogue in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books, with Gillian Beer
Saturday 17 September 2022, 6.00 pm. Winfred Holtby, South Riding, with Claire Davison
Saturday 24 September 2022, 6.00 pm. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, with Ildiko Csengei
Sunday 25 September 2022, 6.00 pm. May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life, with Rebecca Bowler
Past Courses (most recent courses first). All live online via Zoom
Women Writers of the 1920s. Jan-Feb. 2024. SOLD OUT
With Alison Hennegan, University of Cambridge
In this course we explored some of the richness and diversity of women writing in the 1920s.
Male tyranny in marriage, the emergence of golden age detective fiction, comic yet deeply moving explorations of religious and spiritual conflict, and the deepening awareness of the centrality and power of love between women are themes central to the four books we shall read and discuss.
Live online lectures and seminars with Alison Hennegan, retired Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. Four sessions, fortnightly on Tuesdays, 9 January to 20 February 2024, 6.00-8.00 pm British time (GMT).
Set reading
• Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (1921)
• Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel (1927)
Lectures
Lecture 1. Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (1921). Tuesday 9 Jan. 2024, 6.00-8.00 pm
Throughout her long writing life, male domestic tyranny was one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s constant themes. In this novel which many consider her best we gradually learn, through the discoveries of a second wife, the fate which befell her predecessor.
Lecture 2. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Tuesday 23 Jan. 2024, 6.00 pm
The ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction begins in the 1920s and Christie quickly emerged as one of its queens. In this novel, critically considered a landmark in the development of the genre, she spectacularly breaks one of the rules of the game …
Lecture 3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927). Tues. 6 Feb. 2024, 6.00 pm
This remarkable and often rather elusive short novel was Townsend Warner’s second. When Mr Fortune, a middle-aged Anglican priest, opts to spend a year as a missionary on a remote island where he is the only white man, his world is transformed in richly startling ways which cause him to question much of what he believes and knows. This book extends the themes which underpin Lolly Willowes, Townsend Warner’s first novel.
Lecture 4. Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel (1927). Tues. 20 Feb. 2024, 6.00 pm
Elizabeth Bowen would emerge as a major writer during the interwar years, much admired by Woolf. This early novel explores the tensions and crises which beset a group of ex-patriate Englishwomen seeking various forms of escape abroad. Published just one year before Radclyffe Hall’s prosecuted novel, The Well of Loneliness, it addresses the disruptive power of female same-sex love and emotion.
JANE AUSTEN: WOMEN AND SOCIETY COURSE 2024
With Fred Parker, Clare College, University of Cambridge. SOLD OUT
Austen's novels all have at their heart the relation between a woman and her social environment. That environment, always brilliantly conveyed, is shown as variously constraining or depressing or otherwise impoverished. Opportunities for self-expression are few; financial realities, class structures, and gender protocols weigh heavy; and the prospect of women's emancipation into independence which Mary Wollstonecraft had recently envisaged is still far, far away. But that environment is all that there is; in an Austen novel, there is nowhere apart from social reality – no life away on the wild Yorkshire moors (Emily Bronte), nor secure internal possession of 'a room of one's own' (Virginia Woolf).
The particular focus of this course will therefore be the various resources and strategies that Austen's women employ to make space for themselves to live more fully within and despite their world – resources of fantasy, or defiance, or reserve, or wit, or perhaps even the capacity to grieve over the life denied. Among these resources is, almost always, reading, and this may lead us to think about Austen herself, and her own resourcefulness as a maker of fictions that both accept and transfigure the terms of the world in which she lived. We will pay attention to the special qualities of the wonderful narrative voice she creates.
Unlike Austen herself, the women in her novels end in marriage, making some kind of peace with their societal destiny. We shall be looking at the courtship process by which this comes about, and asking, in each different case, about the balance between compromise and resourcefulness rewarded which is implied. What kind of solution does love represent?
We will work through the five most important novels one by one, in their likely order of composition. This should help to bring out both the trajectory of Austen's development, and the different kind of achievement which each book represents.
Five sessions, fortnightly on Sundays, from 14 January to 10 March 2024.
Lectures
Sunday 14 January 2024 Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Sunday 28 January 2024 Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Sunday 11 February 2024 Mansfield Park (1814)
Sunday 25 February 2024 Emma (1815)
Sunday 10 March 2024 Persuasion (1817)
Course Fees
£250 full price for 5 sessions (includes 20% VAT)
£225 discount price for students and CAMcard holders (includes 20% VAT)
Each session lasts from 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm British Time (GMT), live online via Zoom. Please check the time in your time zone.
Optional Further Reading
Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (CUP, 1997; 2006)
Jenny Davidson, Reading Jane Austen (CUP, 2017)
Roger Gard, Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (Yale UP, 1994)
John Mullan, What Matters in Jane Austen? (Bloomsbury, 2012)
Fred Parker, On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen (Routledge, 2018)
Peter Sabor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Emma (CUP, 2015)
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Macmillan, 1986; 2007)
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Penguin, 2012)
John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (CUP, 2014)
Links
• Chronology and details of the novels: Jane Austen Society.
• John Mullan on courtship, love and marriage in Jane Austen’s novels, British Library website.
If possible, please support independent bookshops and online sellers when buying books for our courses. Thank you.
The Power of Women in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy. SOLD OUT
October-December 2023. Taught by Dr Fred Parker and Dr Jan Parker, University of Cambridge.
Women are frequently at the heart of tragic drama - whether as figures of threat, objects of fascination, sources of desire, or sites of conflict and anxiety. They represent destabilising forces, yet also embody a world of value which it is tragic to lose or destroy. This course will explore these issues by looking at some classic plays by Shakespeare and by the Greeks.
The opening lecture, on Antony and Cleopatra, framed much that is to follow, looking at the female roles Cleopatra plays and the stereotypes she has projected upon her: queen, courtesan, wife, lover, the insecure mistress, the mythic goddess. We then alternated between Greek and Shakespearean plays, exploring the association of the women in these plays with higher or darker powers; with forces of overwhelming desire; and with the primal power of motherhood. The two final talks are on tragic plays which do not end in catastrophe, and these explore how different ways of representing women might take us beyond the tragic conflict between male and female.
Lecture list
Lecture 1. Sat. 7 Oct. 2023. Cleopatra's infinite variety (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra)
Lecture 2. Sat. 14 Oct. 2023. Forces to be reckoned with: Clytemnestra and the Furies (Aeschylus, Oresteia)
Lecture 3. Sat. 28 Oct. 2023. Female power: Lady Macbeth and the witches (Shakespeare, Macbeth)
Lecture 4. Sat. 4 Nov. 2023. Desire and misogyny: Phaedra vs. Hippolytos (Euripides, Hippolytos)
Lecture 5. Sun. 19 Nov. 2023. Hamlet's women: Gertrude and Ophelia (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
Lecture 6. Sat. 25 Nov. 2023. Tragic motherhood, loss and restoration (Euripides, Ion)
Lecture 7. Sat. 2 Dec. 2023. Beyond gender conflict? (Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale)
Details of lectures
• Lecture 1. Cleopatra’s infinite variety (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra), with Fred Parker. Sat. 7 Oct. 2023.
When Mark Antony, coming from the masculine world of Rome, encounters Cleopatra, his firm identity slips between his fingers. Is this a disaster, or does Cleopatra's fluid way of being show us something wonderful? She is perhaps the greatest female character in the whole of Shakespeare, but also one of the most challenging to make up our minds about.
• Lecture 2. Forces to be reckoned with: Clytemnestra and the Furies (Aeschylus, Oresteia), with Jan Parker. Sat. 14 Oct. 2023.
Clytemnestra – power-hungry queen, jealous husband-slayer or a woman driven to avenge the killing of her daughter? Irene Pappas, Olympia Dukakis, Diana Rigg and others have played her, memorably, as a woman of power. Do we absolve her when she says she is only the agent of her dead daughter’s Fury?
At the end of the trilogy, the Furies, stirred into retributive action by the ghost of Clytemnestra, are condemned as crones whose time of power has passed; they should give way to Apollo and the ‘new gods’ of the city, the polis.
These plays question the very basis of male power and, perhaps, the fear of the female.
• Lecture 3. Female power: Lady Macbeth and the witches (Shakespeare, Macbeth), with Fred Parker. Sat. 28 Oct. 2023.
‘Unsex me here’, cries Lady Macbeth, yet her power over Macbeth is unmistakeably that of a woman and a wife. Like the witches, she seeks to cross the boundaries of what a woman should be, something that both enhances her power and leads to her undoing. The Macbeths are the strongest marriage in Shakespeare, and their relationship – and its collapse – lies at the heart of the play.
• Lecture 4. Desire and misogyny: Phaedra vs. Hippolytus (Euripides, Hippolytus), with Jan Parker. Sat. 4 Nov. 2023.
Phaedra, overwhelmed by Aphrodite's terrifying power, longs unbearably for the young prince Hippolytus. Though they are noble and like-minded, the forces that divide them are absolute; equally divisive are their claims on our sympathy. Should the tragedy be called ‘Phaedra’ instead, whose suffering inspired plays by Seneca, Racine and, in 2023, the National Theatre's Simon Stone?
• Lecture 5. Hamlet’s women: Gertrude and Ophelia (Shakespeare, Hamlet), with Fred Parker. Sun. 19 Nov. 2023.
‘Frailty, thy name is woman’, exclaims Hamlet, as if all that is wrong in the world could be traced back to female influence and female corruption. Yet Gertrude perhaps and Ophelia certainly have a stronger, more independent life than this suggests, bringing into the tragedy values and realities that are sorely needed.
• Lecture 6. Tragic motherhood, loss and restoration (Euripides, Ion), with Jan Parker. Sat. 25 Nov. 2023.
The Queen of Athens, Creusa, has a painful secret – when she was young, raped by Apollo, she bore and then gave up a son. Now when she is long married but childless, Apollo's oracle promises that there will be an heir. Is there, can there be, a happy ending for this tragic woman?
• Lecture 7. Beyond gender conflict? (Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale), with Fred Parker. Sat. 2 Dec. 2023.
In a fit of mad jealousy, King Leontes kills his wife and destroys his family. Yet the deeper power rests with the women of the play, and in this late work by Shakespeare it is through the qualities the women embody that a path to restoration and reconciliation becomes, at least, imaginable.
Links
Josette Simon on Cleopatra and politics, Guardian March 2017.
Article on women in Shakespeare by Clare McManus, British Library website.
Poetry in Translation provide reliable editions of the Greek plays. You can read the works online or buy the books.
Editions of the Greek plays
Victorian Women: 19thC novels by and about women
September-November 2023
The Victorian period (1837-1901) is often depicted as the heyday of the sexual double standard, cast as repressive, hypocritical, and above all, sexist. Yet it was also the era of the Married Women’s Property Acts, the first girls’ grammar schools and university colleges, and the campaign for votes for women.
The very phrase ‘Victorian woman’ summons up the suffragist as much as the angel in the house; it has both feminist and anti-feminist connotations, suggesting the proto-modern and the emphatically outdated. In a sense, this apparent contradiction is entirely fitting: the Victorian period was the age of ‘the Woman Question’, when the meaning of sexual difference and the proper role of women in society was fiercely debated at every turn. Given that it was also the great age of the novel, it is no surprise that ‘the Woman Question’ is everywhere in the Victorian novel.
In this course, we will look at six great Victorian novels and ask, how do they represent women and women’s experience? We will consider how they both create and complicate archetypes such as the fallen woman, the ‘madwoman’, the gold-digging governess and the martyred angel. We will think critically about the canon of Victorian writing and about genre, as we take a fresh look at beloved classics alongside lesser-known masterpieces, and explore the interplay of gothic, sentimental, sensational and realist traditions in this wonderfully rich period of English fiction.
This course is taught by Dr Clare Walker Gore, Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Sessions are live online via Zoom.
Set books
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1853)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
Margaret Oliphant, Hester (1883)
Optional further reading
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1865)
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866)
George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893)
Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (1897)
Optional Secondary Reading
David Cannadine, Victorious Century: 1800-1906 (2018)
Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life (2023)
Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2006)
Linda H. Peterson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing (2015)
Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983)
Clare Walker Gore, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2020)
Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny
Live online course, Thursdays, 14 September to 26 October 2023
Doris Lessing is one of the most important British writers of recent years. She was described by Margaret Drabble as ‘the kind of writer who changes people’s lives’, and in 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Like Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing is highly perceptive of the history of her times, recording their major events through the eyes of her female protagonists.
Doris Lessing’s novels deal with racial and sexual discrimination, war, poverty, political and humanitarian commitment and climate change. She explores the full spectrum of human experience. Born in 1919, just after the First World War, Doris Lessing spent her youth in colonial Southern Africa and witnessed the nefarious effects of the colour bar. Mistrusting ideologies and debunking stereotypes, she was interested in inter-personal relationships as well as the divisions and contradictions of the self. Her heroines strive towards an ideal of harmony and justice, weaving collective conscience into their personal identities, aiming for comprehension, freedom and growth.
The Nobel Prize committee described her as a great writer ‘of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’.
In this course, we will study four of Doris Lessing’s most interesting novels, exploring both her realistic and non-realistic writing techniques to represent women’s perception of reality in its changing historical context. Our lecturer is Dr Anne-Laure Brevet, University of Cambridge.
Lecture 1. The Grass Is Singing (1950)
Doris Lessing’s first book and undisputed masterpiece, a gripping novel set in colonial Africa. This traces with great psychological depth the unexplained circumstances of the murder of a white woman by her African servant.
Lecture 2. The Golden Notebook (1962)
One of the most influential books of the sixties, and inspirational for feminists, it conveys with a multitude of intertwined sub-stories the struggle of a woman writer to live independently and overcome a writer’s block, at a time when political commitment was at its most intense.
Lecture 3. The Four-Gated City (1969)
This is from the autobiographical Children of Violence series, ‘a study of the individual conscience its relation to the collective’. This book goes deeply into the protagonist’s mind in her maturing years. With its extraordinarily dense material spanning three decades, its symbolic structure and monumental scope, this novel is one of Doris Lessing’s most important works.
Lecture 4. The Summer before the Dark (1973)
This novel traces a middle-aged woman’s journey through depression and self-recovery. It offers a critique of stereotyped sex roles and puts into question traditional mothering roles. It is a powerful account of an identity crisis caused by ageing in a society where appearances prevail over ethical concerns.
Optional further reading: works by Doris Lessing
African Stories (1965)
The Children of Violence (1954-1969)
The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984)
The Fifth Child (1988)
Under My Skin (autobiography, 1994)
The Sweetest Dream (2001)
Optional further reading
• Kevin Brazil, David Sergeant, and Tom Sperlinger, eds., Doris Lessing and the Forming of History (2016)
• Patrick French, The Golden Woman: The Authorised Biography of Doris Lessing (2024)
• Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing (1994)
• Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979)
• Paul Schlueter ed., A Small Personal Voice: Doris Lessing, Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1974)
Links
Doris Lessing interview on her writing career.
Doris Lessing Society.
Doris Lessing: A Retrospective website, listing Lessing’s works.
Guardian article on 5 of Doris Lessing’s books, November 2013.
Close Reading Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) SOLD OUT
In the Artist’s Studio
. . . He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
Another session in our popular close reading series. With poet Mariah Whelan we explore several key poems written over the course of Rossetti’s life. Using a number of close reading techniques, Dr Whelan guided participants to read, analyse and discuss the poetic methods and techniques that have made Rossetti’s poems so much loved for 150 years and more.
Sunday 13 August and Sunday 20 August 2023
Links and further information
• Poetry Foundation on Christina Rossetti
• Poetry Archive on Christina Rossetti, with some poems read aloud
• Victorian Web on Christina Rossetti
• Simon Avery on gender and power in the work of Christina Rossetti, British Library website
• Simon Avery on Christina Rossetti’s religious poetry, British Library website
Close Reading: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
I.
WHAT was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river ?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.(‘A Musical Instrument’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
Amongst nineteenth-century women poets, none have been so critically praised nor so perennially popular as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Continuing with our popular close reading series, Dr Mariah Whelan explored some of Barrett Browning’s most important works. In these two live online sessions, we focused on using close reading techniques to discover a selection of poems written throughout Barrett Browning’s life. Together we observed, analysed and discussed the technical prowess and arresting ideas that make the poems so popular.
Sunday 14 May and Sunday 21 May 2023
Optional further reading
• Simon Avery article on social and political issues in Barrett Browning’s poetry, British Library website
• Simon Avery book on EBB (2011), JStore.
• Poetry Foundation on Barrett Browning
• Poetry Foundation on Sonnets from the Portuguese
• Poetry Archive on Barrett Browning, with some readings of poems
• Victorian Web on Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Browning Society
Bloomsbury: Art and Politics
This second Bloomsbury course with Karina Jakubowicz revisits the work and thinking of the Bloomsbury Group through a new range of texts and sources. We look at the paintings of Vanessa Bell and the fiction of Katherine Mansfield, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf. We also explore the politics which concerned the Group throughout the early twentieth century, including feminism, anti-imperialism, and peace in a post-war landscape, studying key works by John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf and others. The course draws on a range of stimulating sources including autobiography, novels, non-fiction, and short stories.
There are six sessions, weekly, with a week’s break in the middle, after Lecture 3, over the Easter weekend. All sessions are live online via Zoom.
There are two groups:
Friday Group: Friday 24 March to Friday 5 May 2023, 2.00-4.00 pm
Sunday Group: Sunday 19 March to Sunday 30 April 2023, 6.00-8.00 pm
Lecture list
Lecture 1. Bloomsbury and Friendship: E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908)
Lecture 2. Bloomsbury and Art: Vanessa Bell
Lecture 3. Bloomsbury and Commemoration: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Lecture 4. Bloomsbury and post-First World War Politics
Lecture 5. Bloomsbury and the Modern Woman: Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Lecture 6. Bloomsbury and India: Mulk Raj Anand, Selected Short Stories
Iris Murdoch Course 2023: Murdoch and the Gothic
Murdoch's Gothic novels were all produced in the early stages of her career. It was a genre she used to work through her obsessions with power, erotic fascination, and the seductive power of horror.
We will study four of her most gripping Gothic novels.
Wed. 5 April. The Flight from the Enchanter(1956)
Wed. 19 April. The Unicorn (1963)
Wed. 3 May. The Italian Girl (1964)
Wed. 17 May. The Time of the Angels (1966)
Fortnightly on Wednesdays, 5 April to 17 May 2023, 6.00-8.00 pm British Summer Time.
With Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. Live online via Zoom.
Comments from the first Iris Murdoch course:
‘Dr. Leeson is a wonderful speaker on Murdoch, and has an amazingly expansive knowledge of her oeuvre. His lectures opened up a new world of resources to dive into. It was really a treat to attend these fortnightly lectures, and to spend time with other people who wanted to explore Murdoch's novels. I can't wait to pick up where we left off with the Gothic series.’ – Beth, Brighton, UK
Close Reading the Poetry of Robert Browning (1812-1889)
‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her?’(Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, 1842)
We continue our wonderful series of close reading sessions with Dr Mariah Whelan. In this session we explored the pleasure and power of Robert Browning’s poetry. Over the course of two two-hour sessions, we discussed Browning’s dramatic monologues, short poems and epic pieces. Along the way we observed, analysed and discussed the techniques that make the poems so arresting and enjoyable.
An ideal short course for anyone who wants to develop their close reading skills and enhance their enjoyment of the poems. No prior experience of close reading is necessary to take part. Mariah provided a selection of Browning poems for the course, and there are some poems on the Blog page.
Sunday 5 March and Sunday 12 March 2023
Close Reading the Poetry of John Keats
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Poet and academic Dr Mariah Whelan taught a short close reading course focused on the poetry of John Keats, a poet loved and adored by generations of readers. This was the first of our new series of close reading poetry by a variety of writers, starting with some great 19thC poets: Keats, Browning, Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti.
Over two 90-minute sessions, we analysed and discussed together a number of poems including selections from Keats’ odes, sonnets and longer poems. Dr Whelan guided participation in an exploration of how a poem’s formal features, such as rhyme, rhythm, imagery and language, all contribute to its meaning.
On the Blog page: some poems by Keats.
Sunday 15 January and Sunday 22 January 2023
The Contemporary Novel
Why does the novel matter - and what are the great novelists writing about in our age? What do we value in fiction today? We studied six of the most interesting and original novels to have been published since the turn of the millennium.
These books come in a variety of genres and forms – epistolary, fantasy; historical, autofictional – and explore a great range of themes. Each session had a lecture followed by a seminar, led by Joseph Steinberg, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Fridays, 7 October to 16 December 2022, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British time.
Set books
Lecture 1. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
Lecture 2. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
Lecture 3. Kate Grenville, The Secret River (2005)
Lecture 4. Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014)
Lecture 5. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015)
Lecture 6. Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (2020)
Optional further reading
Robert Eaglestone, Contemporary Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (2013)
Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics (2020)
Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now (2015)
Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021)
On the Blog page: article on The Buried Giant and memory.
Past Classical Literature sessions with Jan Parker from Feb. 2022
• Sunday 27 February 2022. Lecture 1: Odysseus and ‘his’ Women: Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Penelope
Odysseus tells unforgettable stories of clashing rocks and murderous monsters but three relationships provide a different kind of danger: to his return to faithful Penelope. The warp and weft of the Odyssey – coming together out of many retellings – contains other voices than Odysseus’, including the gods’ and the narrators’. We will explore how these powerful women’s stories interact with, and go beyond, Odysseus’ own.
Set text: The Odyssey, Books 5, 6, 10, 23
• Saturday 5 March 2022. Lecture 2: Re-discovering Helen: The Iliad and the Trojan Women
Helen of Troy, cast in myth and in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, as both the most beautiful and the most destructive of women, in the Iliad speaks movingly about her fate: a real woman ‘traded’. Both early Greek poetry and archaeology speak to her as a powerful Queen and Goddess. An early Greek story, played on and within Euripides’ Helen, is that the gods gave not the woman but a phantom for Paris to take to Troy. What can we discover about the way this archetypal image of Woman – as most attractive and most destructive - is represented in Homeric epic and Euripides’ tragedies?
Set texts: The Iliad, Books 3, 6; The Trojan Women (esp. from line 900 on)
Sunday 13 March 2022. Lecture 3: Odysseus and Sophocles' Philoctetes: Heroism, Empathy, Toxic Masculinity
Sophocles' late play, performed to a war-battered Athenian audience, asks: what really matters?
The three characters of the Philoctetes – Odysseus the wily strategist, Achilles’ orphaned son Neoptolemos and the aged wounded hero, Philoctetes, marooned on a deserted island – come together to fulfil a destiny: Neoptolemos’ taking of Troy with Philoctetes’ bow. But as relationships develop and the costs become evident, other claims come to undermine the simple winning of this heroic victory. We know what Odysseus wants, but what about Neoptolemos? And the long-isolated, wounded Philoctetes? We will explore Odysseus’ role and rhetorical strategy amid the playing out of complex claims on this principled young man, of destiny, heroic achievement and father-son relationship.
For those interested in Kae Tempest and her 2021 National Theatre version of the play, Paradise, we will have an answer to the critics’ assumption that the play simply ‘undermines the notion of heroic masculinity’.
• Course 1: Re-presenting Women in Greek Tragedy, 24 April to 29 May 2022, Sundays at 6.00 pm.
‘Men find the female hard to handle; that is women’s innate misfortune.’ Creusa, Ion 398-400
Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, Hecuba – these great roles are still treasured by actors and audiences. Looking in detail at the language and dramaturgy, we will discuss how each dramatist has created a great protagonist – a richly complex character reacting in challenging ways to her situation – from a figure of myth.
A protagonist who speaks as a woman – Hecuba, the great ruined Queen, as a grandmother; Medea – barbarian witch and betrayed woman; Electra, mourning Agamemnon, shamed as ‘being hysterical’.
Each of these iconic women has a powerful presence on stage but the source and directedness of that power is different in each drama. We – and the original male audience – are presented with representations of the female condition writ large and controversial on stage. What do we make of each of these women’s tragedy? [How] do we sympathise with them?
Women as victims of war, a mother with son torn from her arms, a young girl giving birth in secret and exposing him, a wife seeing her husband lusting after her much younger ‘lookalike’, the wife of a hero questioning her identity as a widow; ‘on the shelf’ women called obsessive …
Throughout the lectures we’ll also be asking – why? Why did the Athenian democracy prize plays built around such various female protagonists? What questions are explored as well as what sympathies are aroused by envoicing powerful female characters?
We will start with the timeless tragedy of women victims of war – Hecuba, Andromache, Helen (?) and the lamenting Chorus – but then raise the question of Antigone, who has provoked strong reactions for and against in critics and audiences. We’ll go on to situate her, and others who challenge the state and society, in 5th century BCE political and social attitudes and beliefs, asking with her whether there are laws and bonds which are unbreakable, constant and timeless?
Then we’ll look at tragedies built around the complexities of being a woman: at mothers, wives and daughters driven to extremes: Deianeira in Women of Trachis, Creusa in Ion and Electra in Sophocles’ play. [How] do we, did they, recognise and/or sympathise with each?
Medea and Clytemnestra are both archetypes of dangerous women – child and husband destroyers. The Oresteia explores not just Clytemnestra’s actions but her agency. And later in the trilogy she is associated with and into the Eumenides: the Furies, the embodiment of the ‘older law’ of matriarchy.
While both women’s situations are recognisable, questions of their motives and psychology are dramatically complex and push to the limit the questions we’re asking, about the challenge of these great female figures, produced and acted by men to an audience of male citizens, there as a democratic duty. Attending the theatre, like the decision-making Assembly and the Law Courts, was an essential part of being an Athenian. So judging an Antigone, or a Clytemnestra – which happens, in an extraordinary scene, in an on-stage trial – takes place anew each time these are replayed, re-imagined, whether on the stage or by the reader, raising questions which have to be dealt with.
Lectures
Re-presenting Women: The Trojan Women both then and now? Sun. 24 April, 6 pm.
Challenging the state: do we/should we sympathise with Antigone? Sun. 8 May, 6 pm. Set reading: Antigone.
The tragedy of being a woman? Deinaeira in Women of Trachis, Creusa in Ion vs Sophocles’ Electra. Sun 15 May, 6 pm. Set reading: Sophocles, Electra. (And Jan will outline and discuss Deianeira Women of Trachis (lines 1-748) and Creusa in Ion, especially lines 237- 400 and 725-1040, 1369-end.)
Dangerous Women on the Greek stage – Medea and Clytemnestra in Agamemnon. Sun 22 May, 6 pm. Set reading: Medea and Agamemnon.
Matriarchy and the Polis: The Eumenides. Sun 29 May, 6 pm. Set reading: The Eumenides.
Bloomsbury course 1
Bloomsbury: Life and Writing.
A new course with Dr Karina Jakubowicz. We studied some of the great writers and thinkers who formed a loose group based in Bloomsbury in the early twentieth century. The course aimed to dispel some of the myths and to look seriously at the work and lives of these very interesting people, including Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf.
Sundays at 6.00-8.00 pm British Summer Time, 15 May 2022 to 19 June 2022. The course was live online. Course fee: £260 / £230.
Course outline
Week 1
Introduction to the Bloomsbury Group. How did it start, what were their interests and concerns?
Reading: Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘Old Bloomsbury’ (1928) in Woolf, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings.
Week 2
Bloomsbury and the Victorians. The Bloomsbury generation were often highly critical of their Victorian forebears (including their own parents), and it is often assumed that they rejected everything Victorian. But the Bloomsbury group themselves were ‘Victorians’ for the first decades of their lives. As Gillian Beer has shown us, they did not reject the Victorians so much as argue with them, adapt their ideas, forge new ideas and ways of thinking out of, and built upon, the old.
Reading: Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
Further reading: Gillian Beer, ‘Virginia Woolf and the Victorians’ in Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).
Week 3
Bloomsbury and Art. The group included some wonderful artists, including Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington, and their ideas influenced many others. We will focus on Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. Copies of some essays on art from 1910 will be provided.
Week 4
Bloomsbury and Ethics: E. M. Forster and the ideas of G. E. Moore. The Bloomsbury group had a strong sense of ethics: in work, in the social good, the importance of friendship, and more. Forster was on the fringes of Bloomsbury, but he shared some of the ethical vision.
Reading: Forster, Howards End (1910).
Further reading: Barbara Morden, British Library website, on Howards End.
Week 5
Bloomsbury and Empire: members of the Bloomsbury group, like many others in the early 20th century, could see that the European empires were based on injustice and, to a large extent, sustained through oppression and violence. Some, such as Leonard Woolf, who was a Civil Servant in (then) Ceylon, had seen the injustices of empire first-hand and became a lifelong anti-imperialist. Some of the Bloomsbury circle were critical of imperial military structures, and in 1910, a small group of them joined the ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ to mock the British Navy, an event which raises uncomfortable questions about anti-imperialism and racialised thinking.
Reading: Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (1913). This is in print and also available in digital form on Project Gutenberg.
E. M. Forster, Passage to India (1924)
Further reading:
Georgia Johnston, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Talk [1940] on the Dreadnought Hoax’, Woolf Studies Annual (2009), on JStore.
Victoria Glendinning, ’The Village in the Jungle: An Uncolonial Novel’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50, 1 (2015), 11–18
Podcast on The Village in the Jungle, University of Oxford, 2013
Week 6
Bloomsbury and Sexuality: many members of the Bloomsbury group were gay or bisexual, and they were often resistant to conventional views of gender.
Reading: Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928).
*
General further reading
Quentin Bell et al, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, rev. edn (White Lion Publishing, 2018)
Mark Hussey, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Victoria Rosner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (CUP, 2014)
Susan Sellers, Firebird (novel about Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes) (EER, 2022)
Frances Spalding, The Bloomsbury Group (National Portrait Gallery, 2013; 2021)
Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (1983; I B Tauris, 2018)
Links
National Trust webpage on the Bloomsbury Group
BBC on John Maynard Keynes and Cezanne’s apples
Charleston website
Leonard Woolf on the Bloomsbury Group (audio, 10 mins)
Iris Murdoch and London Course, April-May 2022
Post-war London was Iris Murdoch’s domain. She knew the city as well as a London cabbie. We studied four great novels by Iris Murdoch, each with its own view of London. Four x 2-hour sessions, fortnightly, 6 April to 18 May 2022. Live online via Zoom. With Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester.
Set books
Under the Net (1954)
The Nice and the Good (1968)
The Black Prince (1973)
The Green Knight (1993)
Links
Blog by Miles Leeson on Iris Murdoch and London
Iris Murdoch: London map
Podcast: On locations in Murdoch’s novels
*
Comments from a participant:
‘Dr. Leeson is a wonderful speaker on Murdoch, and has an amazingly expansive knowledge of her oeuvre. His lectures opened up a new world of resources to dive into. It was really a treat to attend these fortnightly lectures, and to spend time with other people who wanted to explore Murdoch's novels. I can't wait to pick up where we left off with the Gothic series.’ - Beth, Brighton, UK
Writing Workshop: The Sonnet
with mariah Whelan
Friday 19 November and Friday 26 November 2021
Live online via Zoom
Overview
This creative writing workshop takes place in 2 x 2-hour sessions, a week apart, live online via Zoom. In the sessions, participants will learn about the conventions of the sonnet form and how to play with these rules to produce a poem of their own. We’ll explore how the sonnet’s conventions have been used to express certain themes and ideas for nearly 800 years.
We will complete exercises to generate new ideas and learn how to shape our poems through careful editing. Together, we’ll read classic and contemporary poems by Shakespeare, Yeats, Heaney and sam sax, amongst others.
This workshop series is an ideal follow up to our 6-week course ‘History of the Sonnet’, but you are welcome to attend even if you did not take the previous course. Our teacher is Dr Mariah Whelan, University of Cambridge and University College London.
Aims
• to introduce the conventions of the sonnet form and how these rules can support certain themes and ideas
• to introduce a number of strategies to get into a poetry writing ‘headspace’
• to equip participants with creative techniques to generate initial ideas and images
• to develop participants’ ability to shape their initial ideas into first drafts
• to learn a number of editing methods to polish first drafts into finished poems
Course Outline
Session 1: Getting Started
In our first session, we’ll begin by exploring how the sonnet’s conventions have evolved to support certain themes and ideas. Participants will then be led through a number of exercises as we consider how to manipulate these rules to express our own ideas. We will focus on how to shift into a poem writing ‘headspace’, how to generate initial ideas and images, as well as how to shape our writing into a first draft.
Session 2: Shaping and Editing
In the second session, we will focus on polishing our poems into final drafts. Students will be taken through a number of editorial exercises and have the opportunity to give and receive constructive peer feedback on their work in a compassionate and supportive environment. We will finish by discussing publication strategies and next steps.
Fees
£84 for two sessions full price
£76 for two sessions students and CAMcard holders
Lecturer Bio
Dr Mariah Whelan is The Jacqueline Bardsley Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Creative Practice at University College London. She is the author of the novel-in-sonnets The Love I Do To You (Eyewear, 2019) which was shortlisted for The Melita Hume Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. Her creative-critical research explores the intersection of trauma, archives and form. Her research has been published in the journal Writing in Education (2019) and On Commemoration: Global Reflections Upon Remembering War (2020) from Peter Lang.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
An intensive session studying one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest novels. Based on Woolf’s memories of childhood summers by the sea, To the Lighthouse is a powerfully moving account of love, art, and loss.
To the Lighthouse: The Mother in the Garden
This Study Session introduced Woolf’s great novel to readers, and explored some of its key themes. We looked at how Woolf thinks about mothers and mothering in the novel, alongside her thoughts on loss and mourning. We also looked briefly at how Woolf uses plants and gardens in the book, and how these might connect to the theme of mothering.
Lecture and a seminar on Zoom led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 9 May 2020
Sunday 10 May 2020
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925): Peace and Betrayal
An intensive session studying Virginia Woolf’s memorable novel set on a single day in London in 1923. Mrs Dalloway traces the joys, sufferings, and memories of two very different characters: Clarissa Dalloway, married to a Conservative Member of Parliament; and Septimus Smith, a former soldier who is suffering from shell shock. The book is famous for its capacity to weave in and out of the minds of different characters. But it looks outwards as well as inwards. Mrs Dalloway is very interested in the politics and culture of its time. In 1923, thousands of former soldiers were still suffering from the effects of war trauma, after the First World War of 1914-1918. Other people, both soldiers and civilians, were recovering after the flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which killed more people than the war. Woolf brings a sharp critical eye to the political system in the years immediately after the First World War. What had been learned from the war? Who was taking responsibility for the peace, and the unsatisfactory peace treaties? How was war to be avoided in the future? These were urgent issues in the early 1920s.Lecture and seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and a Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Trudi has a chapter on Mrs Dalloway in her book, Modernism, History and the First World War (rev. edn, HeB, 2013).
Sunday 24 May 2020
Saturday 30 May 2020
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929): 1. After the War
Trudi Tate explores Woolf’s thoughts on the First World War in A Room of One's Own. For Woolf, as for many intellectuals of the period, the war changed things very profoundly. How had European civilisation come to destroy itself this devastating conflict? Indeed, perhaps the war threw the very idea of civilisation into question.
The need to rebuild fractured societies and to secure a just peace were surely the most pressing issues for Britain and for all of Europe in the 1920s. Women must be part of that process. How did the war alter our perception of the world, and where would we go next? What part might literature play in this process?
Saturday 17 May 2020
Sunday 5 July 2020
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929): 2. Women and Education
Every aspiring woman writer, Woolf argues, needs ‘a room of her own’. But, she wonders, has there ever really been ‘Room’ for women in the world? In this justly celebrated essay, which grew from lectures which she gave in 1928 to women undergraduates in Cambridge, Woolf addresses the price paid, by women themselves and by society at large, for their systematic exclusion from history, literature and, perhaps most significantly of all, education. Online lecture and seminar with Alison Hennegan.
Saturday 6 June 2020
Saturday 18 July 2020
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929): 3
A Room of One’s Own and Space
Virginia Woolf famously claimed that a woman needed money and a room of her own if she was to write fiction. Despite money being a key component of this formula, it is the room that dominates the imagination of readers. This is partly due to the fact that quads, halls, libraries, and roads, loom large in an essay that essentially asks where (if anywhere) a female author can be productive. This lecture will follow the progress of the narrator/s as she travels through spaces that admit her and around those that do not. Not content to be put in her ‘place,’ she seeks out a new territory to occupy on her own terms. Woolf emphasises how rare these spaces are, and stipulates the exact conditions under which they might be created. What she describes is a space that has not been shaped by unwelcome politics or rules, nor imposed upon by the needs of others. It is only in this environment, she suggests, that a woman can both pursue the act of writing, and find the words to suit her experience. These words, like these rooms, are different to the ones that men have created for themselves. For Woolf, the room is not only a practical resource, it is also a metaphor for language. The lecture will conclude by discussing the room as book, sentence, and word, and suggest that the room represents more than just a physical sanctuary: it is a clean page. Online lecture and seminar with Karina Jakubowicz.
Saturday 11 July 2020
Sunday 12 July 2020
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The 14th of February 1895 was the opening night of Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest. It opened at the St James’s Theatre in London’s West End when Wilde was at the very pinnacle of his success. Another play, An Ideal Husband, was already packing audiences in at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, and a host of other literary and dramatic successes lay behind him. He had achieved all this by the age of 40, and his fame had spread far beyond Britain, to Russia and North America.
Just three months after that triumphal opening night, Wilde would be convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour after being tried at the Old Bailey for offences under the new Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which outlawed every form of sexual contact between men.
It is hard for us now to recapture the intensity of loathing, terror, and violence of the public response to the events surrounding the trial and the revelations made during it. Wilde’s fall was complete, his reputation shattered, and his health wrecked by his imprisonment. After his release in 1897, life in Britain was not possible, and he spent the poignantly few remaining years of his life in desperately impoverished exile. He died in 1900 in Paris’s Hôtel d’Alsace, able to live there only by virtue of the owner’s generosity.
It was a far cry from the brilliance, exuberance, and joyous wit of The Importance of Being Earnest. And yet, in this play we can also trace some much more serious elements. This perfect comedy, built on deception, false or lost identities, double lives, and the constant fear of discovery, punishment and social rejection, has clear and poignant links with Wilde's real-life drama, played out in the courts, prisons, and wanderings which shaped his later life.Online Study Session with Alison Hennegan.
Saturday 13 June 2020
Link: Guardian article (2014) on Wilde’s time in Reading Gaol.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves 1: An Introduction
An accessible introduction to Woolf’s most lyrical novel, The Waves (1931), with Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 20 June 2020
Virginia Woolf, The Waves 2: Six Characters in Search of a Self
The title Six characters in Search of a Self, semi-echoes the title of Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author.
This lecture explored some of the many quests, puzzles and complexities with which The Waves presents us when we attempt to think about the nature of ‘character’ itself, as well as the actual characters we encounter in the book – six of them, or is it seven if we include the largely absent Percival, dead at twenty-five? – and to think too of their relation to each other, and the relation of all of them to their creator, Virginia Woolf. Live online lecture and seminar with Alison Hennegan, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 27 June 2020
E. M. Forster: For Love of Italy
Live online lecture and seminar on Forster’s novels set in Italy. Britons have been flocking to Italy for centuries but how well do they understand what they find there - the people, their values, their history, and – possibly most important of all – their feelings? And do the visitors really even like the locals, or do they find them deeply disturbing, far too foreign, and far too Italian for comfort? The possibility of mutual misunderstanding is all but infinite, a potential source of farce, and sometimes of disaster. In his two early 'Italian' novels, 'Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with A View (1908), E.M. Forster combines wonderfully poised comic writing with a deeply serious exploration of why and how such constant cultural clashes and incomprehension may produce tragedy, and all 'for love of Italy'. With Alison Hennegan.
Saturday 5 July 2020
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts and Gardens
The garden in Between the Acts is both a setting and stage. It serves as the backdrop for Miss La Trobe's ambitious play, and forms the framework for Woolf's intriguing novel. While Miss La Trobe attempts to turn the garden into a microcosm of England, Woolf's intention is to show us the futility of doing so. No matter how hard Miss La Trobe tries, the landscape will not behave: the wind carries away the actors' lines, and the roaring of planes distracts from the performance. Despite being the most English of spaces, the garden is unable to live up to the ideal that the actors attempt to illustrate.
Throughout the course of Miss La Trobe's bizarre and often confusing play, Woolf appears to be telling us something about the business of nation building. Creating a nation is an artistic process, one that involves a degree of physical shaping followed by layer upon layer of narrative. Indeed, Woolf indicates that nation building is quite like gardening. There is a certain amount of plotting and digging, accompanied by a great deal of romanticising, all in order to make a space that feels like a little world of its own.
The novel is set on the brink of World War II, and was published in the midst of that war. The first British readers of the text were acutely aware that their nation (its values, its culture, its people) were under threat. Many wondered whether an England occupied by Hitler would still be England. Although belief in the concept of nationhood was at an all time high, it had never been harder to pin that nationality down, to make it actualised and concrete. Much as a patient gardener has to renew their labours day after day, so a national landscape has to be reinforced and rewritten. Woolf uses the novel to tell her readers something that goes beyond politics – that if England is a garden, it must be maintained with great care. With Karina Jakubowicz.
Saturday 25 July 2020
Virginia Woolf, Orlando 1: Property
Orlando is a book about gender, and this means, less obviously, that it is also a book about property. As a woman, Orlando is limited in her ability to inherit property, and it is only her previous life as a man that allows her to remain in her ancestral home. This lecture will explore Woolf’s interest in property in terms of land ownership, and how this shaped the sexual politics of the book.
It will consider Woolf’s relationship with Vita Sackville West, whose life and family were the inspiration behind the book. It will also discuss Sackville West's own attitude towards land ownership, how this emerges in her writing. Finally, it will explain how Orlando primed Woolf to begin writing A Room of One's Own, a founding text of material feminism that argues for property as necessary to a woman's freedom. With Karina Jakubowicz.
Saturday 1 August 2020
Sunday 2 August 2020
Link. Blog post: Karina Jakubowicz reviews a new edition of Orlando.
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (1919)
Katherine Mansfield called Night and Day ‘a novel in the tradition of the English novel’.
Night and Day is a fascinating but relatively unknown novel by Woolf. Its plot resembles the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. Its structure recalls the serial novels of the Victorian period, while its settings are distinctly Edwardian. It’s a good read, yet critics are sometimes unsure how to read it. A month after the novel's publication, Woolf wrote in a letter to her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, that ‘some say the first chapters are the best, and others say the last, and some say it's in the tradition, and others say it's not, but the great battle [...] is between those who think it unreal and those who think it real.’ With Ellie Mitchell.
Saturday 8 August 2020
Link. Blog post: Ellie Mitchell reviews a new edition of Night and Day.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915)
In Woolf's first published novel, The Voyage Out, we can already see clear traces of the writer she would become. We can also see some of the themes and concerns which would exercise her for the rest of her writing life. In her heroine, Rachel Vinrace, deeply gifted musically, but disastrously unconfident socially, we watch the struggles of one young woman to attain self-knowledge, independence of thought and action, and the ability to find and form relationships of genuine value and connexion. With Alison Hennegan.
Saturday 15 August 2020
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber stories (1979)
Karina Jakubowicz presented a lecture and seminar on Angela Carter’s eerie, fascinating stories in The Bloody Chamber. Karina addressed Carter's use of landscape and space in her fairy tales, and looked at her representation of houses and thresholds. How does Carter use these elements to explore the relationship between the known and the unknown?
Links
British Council on Angela Carter’s writings.
British Library website: an introduction to The Bloody Chamber.
London Review of Books website: introduction to The Bloody Chamber by Carter biographer, Edmund Gordon, 2016.
Saturday 22 August 2020
Sunday 13 December 2020
Katherine Mansfield and the Drama of Being a Child
Katherine Mansfield was one of the greatest short story writers of the twentieth century. Born in New Zealand, she lived for most of her writing life in England and in other parts of Europe. In this intensive Study Session we explored some of her brilliant, poignant, and entirely unsentimental stories about childhood, written in the years 1918-1921. Lecture and seminar led by Trudi Tate, Director of Literature Cambridge and Fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Set reading: ‘The Garden Party’, ‘Bliss’, ‘Sun and Moon’, ‘The Doll’s House’, all in Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories (Penguin, 2007), and also available on the website of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Further reading: ‘Her First Ball’, ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’.
28 June 2020
5 Sept 2020 repeat
Links
British Library website on Katherine Mansfield’s life.
British Library website, introduction to Mansfield’s stories by Stephanie Forward.
Some pages of the first edition of Mansfield’s The Garden Party (1922), British Library.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando 2: Clothing and Gender
Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando follows the fortunes of the central character who defies conventions of biography, time and gender by living through four centuries and changing sex halfway through. It questions gendered identity and the role played by dress in its construction. How and why does dress affect behaviour? Can Orlando be the same, when dressed in trousers or skirts?
Online lecture and seminar with Claire Nicholson, Chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.
Sunday 6 September 2020
Gillian Beer: Reading The Waves Across a Lifetime
Live online lecture and seminar with Dame Gillian Beer, distinguished Woolf scholar and retired Edward VII Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, who talked about the experience of reading and teaching Woolf’s great novel, The Waves, for more than 50 years.
Saturday 12 September 2020
Literary Connections: Elizabeth von Arnim and Virginia Woolf
Elizabeth von Arnim is probably best remembered as the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898) and The Enchanted April (1922). She was, however, a prolific comic novelist and a well-known literary celebrity in her day. She was the elder cousin of Katherine Mansfield, and she knew Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells, Ethel Smyth, George Moore, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf, amongst others.
Von Arnim’s novels are ‘laugh-out-loud’ funny (as Woolf put it). But they are also quite serious, exploring a broad range of political issues. Von Arnim is a fascinating and complex writer whose comedy is now receiving far greater attention than at any time since her death in 1941, and whose personal and literary associations are increasingly revealing.
We’ll be uncovering some of these connections, and there will be opportunity to discuss their significance as we reinsert this witty writer into the early twentieth century literary scene.
We will focus on Elizabeth von Arnim’s comedy Expiation (1929), recently republished by Persephone Books. This edition will be our core text, read as a counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel von Arnim admired enormously. Please read (re-read) To the Lighthouse if you can.
Von Arnim’s much-loved novel The Enchanted April will be a secondary text and you might find it interesting to also watch the 1992 Oscar winning film of the same title, directed by Mike Newell.
Lecturer: Dr Isobel Maddison, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
Saturday 19 September 2020
Virginia Woolf, ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’
When Virginia Woolf was on the brink of writing Jacob's Room (1922) she imagined her short stories, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’, and ‘An Unwritten Novel’ ‘taking hands and dancing in unity’ to create something ‘entirely different.’ Prior to this she had written ambitious novels that nonetheless retained traditional narrative forms, but Jacob's Room would be hailed as a distinctively modern text.
What makes her later writing ‘modern’ and her earlier work traditional? What did these three stories do to contribute to this change? This lecture will answer these questions by looking closely at each story, and establishing how Woolf developed her narrative technique. It will also explore how her personal circumstances, in particular the founding of the Hogarth Press, allowed her to make bolder creative decisions. With Karina Jakubowicz.
Saturday 26 September 2020.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), with Clare Walker Gore
The parallels between Eliot and her heroine, Maggie, are striking: Eliot too grew up in a modest home in the Midlands, had a brother who disapproved of her choices, and was unable (or unwilling) to live up to her family's expectations. It is hard to resist the conclusion that, as Virginia Woolf puts it, Eliot ‘shows herself’ in Maggie.
Yet if her childhood was very like her heroine’s, Eliot’s adulthood could hardly have been more different, for she more than survived her family's disapproval, forging a career as a translator and writer, moving to London to live independently, and then choosing to live with her partner G. H. Lewes, even though they were unable to marry. In real life, neither her brother’s rejection nor her defiance of social taboos destroyed her. Why, then, does she not allow Maggie the same escape? When the real Marian Evans lived and thrived, why must the fictional Maggie Tulliver suffer a different fate?
Saturday 17 October 2020.
Link:
George Eliot Archive
‘A Queer Romance’: The Strange Affair of Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde
When Oscar Wilde died in Paris in 1900 the young Katherine Mansfield had only just reached her thirteenth birthday and was half a world away in New Zealand. Nevertheless, after his death Wilde, whom she had never met, continued to play a large part in the young Katherine’s life: she identified with him, held ‘conversations’ with him, confided her sexual anxieties and confusions to him in her journals. Sometimes she even assumed his identity and called herself by his name.
As an aspiring writer the young Katherine Mansfield absorbed Wilde’s aesthetic, and emulated aspects of his work and style. This lecture explores some of the ways in which Mansfield’s experience illuminates the connexions between the predominantly male phenomenon of late nineteenth-century ‘Decadence’ and an emerging Modernism. It also considers ways in which those connexions transcend the boundaries of sex and gender, boundaries which Mansfield resisted for much of her life. Live online lecture and seminar with Alison Hennegan.
31 October 2020
Shakespeare: King Lear
Online Study Session on one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, with Professor Adrian Poole, Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
Adrian Poole will lecture on King Lear and the 'extreme verge'. This play has often been thought to extend traditional ideas of tragedy as far as they can go. This lecture will start from the scene on Dover Cliff, and explore what it means – for the play, for its characters, for readers and audiences – to be ‘stretched out’.
Probably written in 1604, King Lear tells the story of an ageing king who divides his kingdom unequally between his daughters. In the conflicts which follow, Lear gradually descends into madness. One injustice leads to another. He understands his own folly, too late.
For a detailed summary of the plot, see the Royal Shakespeare Society website.
Saturday 28 November 2020
Lisa Hutchins writes about this lecture on our Blog page.
Trudi Tate, Writing about Home: Refugee Writings
We studied some powerful writings by refugees. Where is ‘home’ for people forced out of their homelands? Can home be found in a place of refuge – if a place of refuge can be found? We explored contemporary stories and testimonies in Refugee Tales (UK), plus short stories in Viet Nguyen’s The Refugees (US). Nguyen was a child refugee from Viet Nam in the 1970s.
This event raised funds for two refugee charities in the UK: Refugee Tales and Freedom from Torture.
Saturday 26 December 2020
The Novel as History: Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Beloved is one of the most important American novels of the late twentieth century. Beloved is complex tale of memory and trauma, a postmodern ghost story about the psychological consequences of slavery on a family, a people, and a nation. Set in 1873 and looking back to the 1850s, Beloved explores the African-American struggle for emancipation and freedom. It asks how, through narrative, we might reckon with the voices and stories of the dispossessed and ‘disremembered’ of slavery.
Lecture by Kasia Boddy; seminar led by Trudi Tate.
Saturday 23 January 2021
Claire Davison, Katherine Mansfield: Stories in Music
Katherine Mansfield dreamt of being a cellist and song writer before she took up prose. She sold her cello, but never lost sight of her musical apprenticeship. From her earliest compositions to the canary’s song in her last (unfinished) short story, music plays an essential role in her literary imagination. In this session, we’ll explore the rich variety of musical languages in Mansfield’s short stories – from portraits of musicians to musical performance and some of the popular music of the times. We’ll also listen to some of the music that’s written into the texts, and think about how it changes what we read. With Claire Davison, Professor of Modernist Studies at the Sorbonne, Paris.
Saturday 6 February 2021
Corinna Russell, Dickens, Bleak House (1852-53)
Representation and the People
Mid-way between two electoral reform acts, Dickens wrote a novel preoccupied by related questions of representation. Who can represent the people of England? Can women represent themselves? How do literacy, reading, and story-telling confer personhood or humanity? Do the institutions which represent the state – law, church and government – also represent individuals, or is that task better taken up by novels?
Corinna Russell, Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 20 February 2021
Hugh Stevens, Lawrence’s Nature Poetry
The poetry collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) expresses Lawrence’s remarkable joie de vivre in the years after the First World War. The poems in the collection were written between 1919 and 1923, and follow D. H. Lawrence’s and Frieda Lawrence’s peregrinations from Tuscany and Sicily, through Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia and ending up in the American Southwest.
The poems all use a disarmingly casual and fluent speaking voice full of challenging addresses to the reader. They are delightful, full of spontaneous inventive verbal creativeness, marvellously original observations of the natural world, thoughts about our relationship with our environment, and often containing profound and sustained meditations on the meeting between the human and the non-human.
D. H. Lawrence described his novel Kangaroo as a ‘thought-adventure’, and these poems are all ‘thought-adventures’ in their own way. We will focus on a selection of poems, including: ‘Pomegranate’, ‘Fig’, ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’, ‘Bare Almond Trees’, the sequence of poems about a family of tortoises, and his great masterpiece ‘Snake’. Most of these poems are collected on our blog page.
Live online lecture and seminar with Hugh Stevens, Senior Lecturer, University College London
Saturday 20 March 2021
Frankenstein and Romantic Science
This session explored questions about the ethics of scientific research that Mary Shelley grapples with in her powerful novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818).
The novel's protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, creates life through the power of scientific discovery, setting off a chain of events that unleashes evil and destruction on his life, his family, and also, potentially, on the wider world.
His successful experiment to re-create the spark of life turns into a disaster because defies both the sanctity of God's creation and the natural biology of childbirth in an act of Faustian ambition and tragic hubris.
Mary Shelley was fascinated with the power of science. Shelley's age saw important advances in the study of gases, electricity and anatomy. Moreover, the age also witnessed the emergence of the Romantic scientist genius – one who does not simply make world-leading discoveries but who also entertains his audience with the magic that science is capable of.
This lecture explored the impact of contemporary scientific ideas and texts on Shelley's novel and discussed the moral ambivalence surrounding science in the Romantic age.
With Ildiko Csengei, Cambridge, author of Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century.
Saturday 22 May 2021. This lecture will be repeated in September 2022.
Adrian Poole, Playing for Time in Hamlet
This not a phrase that Shakespeare could have known – 'to play for time' – yet he would have recognised and liked it, for it raises questions that are central to his plays about what makes for 'a good time', not least in this great play about a youth confronting a time that is 'out of joint'.
Join us for an accessible and fascinating lecture and seminar with Professor Adrian Poole, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Reading
The main reading is the text of Hamlet in any good edition, and if you have a chance, watch one or two good versions of the play. If you wish to do some optional secondary reading, we suggest:
• Paul Cantor, Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
• Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Saturday 27 March 2021
Unhistoric Acts: Middlemarch and the Practice of Everyday Life
For some readers, Middlemarch is a kind of handbook or guide in troubled times, and yet it is far from proposing clear-cut answers to the biggest questions arising from time and chance, or even from social life. The concluding lines of the final chapter write the contribution of 'unhistoric acts', into the progress narrative of 'the growing good of the world' in the Victorian age, but do so as an implicit epitaph for the 'hidden' life of its heroine.
This lecture discussed nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies of the 'practice of everyday life' to frame our reading of this extraordinary, complex and uplifting novel. With Corinna Russell, Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
Saturday 30 October 2021
Letters from the Asylum: how to write when no one will read it
An introduction to the powerful and poignant writings of Ivor Gurney, with Kate Kennedy.
Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) was unique in being both a poet and a composer. He survived the worst of the trenches of the First World War, only to find himself so mentally unstable that he was forcibly locked in a lunatic asylum for the last 15 years of his life.
From there he could do nothing but write – letters that were poems, poems that were letters, to people, places, imaginary recipients. These letters have been forgotten about in archives ever since, but they are beautiful, tragic and eccentric in equal measure. Most importantly, they are an unprecedented window into the mind of an asylum patient – a voice that speaks articulately for a generation of silenced men incarcerated after the war.
Kate Kennedy is Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and the author of a new biography of Gurney.
Sunday 31 October 2021
Links
Some samples of Gurney’s poetry and asylum letters on our Blog page.
Kate presented a programme on Gurney on BBC Radio 3.
Review of Kate’s biography of Gurney in the Literary Review.
Kate on Gurney in Gramophone magazine
Orwell's Words in 1984
What role does language play in Orwell's vision of a totalitarian dystopia, and what does this tell us about the period in which this text was written?
Orwell believed that language, knowledge, and power were intimately connected, and that people were shaped (for better or worse) by this fact. This idea is epitomised in 'newspeak': a way of making errant thoughts impossible by eliminating the words that express these thoughts.
Orwell's belief in the profound psychological influence of language stems from contemporary politics and was reinforced by anthropologists and psychologists alike. This lecture will unpack some of this this background, explaining how one of literature's greatest wordsmiths understood the nature of his own medium. With Karina Jakubowicz.
Saturday 20 November 2021
Links
British Library on Orwell.
Nathan Waddell webpages on Orwell.
BBC Radio 4 series, ‘Orwell in Five Words’, 2019. On BBC Sounds.
Class conflict and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
Everyone knows – even those, or perhaps particularly those, who have not read the novel – that D. H. Lawrence’s final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is about sex. The notoriety of the 1960 trial of Penguin Books for publishing an ‘obscene article’ continues to shape our perception of the novel. It is most commonly viewed in relation to the sexual politics of the 1960s and 1970s: the so-called ‘sexual liberation’ of the sixties, and feminist criticism of the 1970s.
This lecture situates the novel in the class and cultural politics of the 1920s. On 4 May 1926, after 1.2 million coal miners were ‘locked out’ of work by their employers, a General Strike began. Although the TUC called off the strike on 12 May, the miners remained out of work until November. Lawrence visited the British Midlands, and his home town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in October 1926, and he began writing the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover later that month.
Class conflict in England was always in Lawrence’s mind as he wrote the three versions of the novel. His portrayal of the relationship between Connie, the daughter of a Royal Academy landscape painter, wife of a baronet, a member of what the novel calls ‘landed aristocratic society’, and Mellors, the son of a collier who, before he was a gamekeeper, had been a blacksmith on the pit-bank, is acutely aware of the class differences between the two lovers. At the heart of the novel is a class conflict that remains unresolved today: its effects continued to be felt in the 1980s, when the mines were closed, and in debates around Brexit.
The novel is a curious mixture of pessimism and optimism. Its pessimism is expressed by Sir Clifford, who believes that there is ‘a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes’. Its optimism is expressed in the relationship between Connie and Mellors, which does not ignore this gulf: on the contrary, class differences are always present when the two lovers come together.
With Hugh Stevens, University College London
Sunday 21 November 2021
Who’s Who in Richard III
Shakespeare’s play Richard III boasts a bewilderingly large cast of characters. Some have names and stories of their own; others do not. Who are they all? Set over against them is an unforgettable clown-villain-hero, one of Shakespeare’s most singular protagonists. As the play progresses, the story it tells gets clearer and simpler, a tale of the one versus the many. Is this how something called ‘history’ gets made, by simplifying lived experience into easily grasped patterns?
With Adrian Poole, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Saturday 27 November 2021
Classics Lecture: Homer’s Trojan Women
Hecuba, Andromache and Helen of Troy, Briseis and other slave women ... Homer gives them a tragic presence, allows their voices to be heard and insists their fate affects us, still.
Homer's tragic epic set in the last days of the Trojan War is the story of the pre-eminent heroes Achilles and Hektor. But the voices that ring out, now as then, are those of their women: victims of but also commentators on 'heroic war'. Homer's Iliad is a multilayered epic poem of terrible beauty, vividly dramatising the tragedy that was the Fall of Troy.
Parts of the Iliad we will discuss: Iliad books 1, 3, 6, 19, 22, 24 (available online - eg Poetry in Translation https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.php - and in many translations)
Lecturer: Jan Parker, University of Cambridge
Second Woolf Season
Woolf and Theatre: Freshwater
Virginia Woolf was not only a novelist, essayist, reviewer, and biographer. She was also a playwright. Her comic play Freshwater was first written in the summer of 1923, but it was later revised and performed to an audience of around eighty guests at Vanessa Bell’s London studio in January 1935. A roaring satire of Victorian sensibilities and of Woolf’s own ancestors, Freshwater originally starred Vanessa Bell as the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Duncan Grant as the artist G. F. Watts, and Angelica Bell as the actress Ellen Terry.
This lecture offers a rare chance to explore this little-known but witty and wonderful play in the context of Woolf's wider theatrical interests and Bloomsbury's various theatrical activities. It will also take a light-hearted look at the role of comedy in Woolf’s attitude towards her Victorian background and literary inheritance. With Ellie Mitchell, University of St Andrews.
Saturday 18 December 2021