A visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge to view the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own Participant Nicky Sherwood writes about one of the visits made during the Woolf’s Women summer course 2023, Cambridge  On an unseasonably drizzly Thursday in July, all the students from the Woolf’s Women Summer Course were invited into the calm sanctuary of the Fitzwilliam Museum for a private viewing of the manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s influential essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf had given two talks in October 1928 at Newnham and Girton Colleges entitled ‘Women and Fiction’ in which she famously ..read more

The Charge of the Light Brigade The Charge of the Light Brigade took place at the Battle of Balaklava, 25 October 1854. The first reports appeared in The Times on 13 and 14 November 1854. Tennyson was moved by the newspaper reports, and wrote the poem in early December (not immediately, as is sometimes claimed). It was published in The Examiner in December 1854. See further reading, below. We study this poem and its historical context in our Victorian Season, Saturday 21 October 2023 with a live online lecture and seminar by Trudi Tate. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) The Charge of the Light Brigad ..read more

Virginia Woolf’s Women: Summer Course in Cambridge I was overjoyed when, in 2022, Literature Cambridge announced they would bring back the Virginia Woolf in-person summer course for 2023. The 2022 online experience was behind me, and I assumed the in-person variant would be nothing if not a hundred times better. I had no idea. Girton College, July 2023. Photo: Seb Peters. The organisation was impeccable. My brother lives in the UK and I visit him regularly every year, but it wouldn’t occur to him to inform me about train strikes or give me suggestions for sightseeing (bookshops even less so ..read more

It Loosens the Ligaments’: A Review of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Unexpurgated’ Diary The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volumes 1-5, by Virginia Woolf (Granta Books, 2023) Review by Dr Galen Bunting, Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.   The topmost level of my undergraduate university library was lined with tall pine bookshelves, where I found The Diary of Virginia Woolf in five volumes (1977-1984). Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, wife of Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, this was the most complete version of Woolf’s diaries. My university library eventually recalled the books, and since the diaries were ..read more

With Virginia Woolf in Cambridge Blog reposted with permission from Bookword by Caroline Lodge At Girton with Alison Hennegan, Old Girtonian and retired Fellow of Trinity Hall. Photo: Seb Peters. I risk making some readers jealous, but I have just returned from a 5-day summer school in Cambridge, devoted to Virginia Woolf. Not all of Virginia Woolf, but 5 specified books. And I want to share some of it. Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928) A Room of One’s Own (1929) Between the Acts (1941) The popular view pictures Virginia Woolf as an effete, delicate, isol ..read more

Virginia Woolf’s Women An online week of study July 10–14, 2023 Ignited by a life-long passion for Virginia Woolf’s writing I signed up to spend an intensive week immersed in her work with scholars, readers, and enthusiasts from around the world during the Literature Cambridge 2023 Summer Online course Woolf’s Women. This programme offered a rich opportunity to delve into Woolf’s writing and her world. We studied five books: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, and Between the Acts. We did this as an international community of learners and thinkers brought together to ..read more

Participant Jude Alford writes about her experiences of Woolf’s Women online summer course in July 2023 ‘When I saw this year’s Woolf’s Women online course I booked my spot straight away.  I am from Melbourne, Australia, down the bottom of the world really.  It is a 24-hour flight to attend the summer course in person, which I have done in the past and thoroughly enjoyed. I met the most engaging people who have become lifelong friends. I do hope to attend another Cambridge Summer course and spend time with other participants from all over the world, but coming from Australia eac ..read more

Blog post by Miles Leeson Scratch the surface of just about any Murdoch novel and, just like the nineteenth-century forerunners she wished to emulate, there are elements of the Gothic. Although she wished to distance herself from this, ‘As a would-be realist, and somebody who I hope is writing novels that have a lot of different characteristics and different atmospheres, I would not like to be labelled a Gothic Novelist. I would regard this as limiting in a slightly derogatory sense’, in 1978 she agreed that her London novels had much in common with the genre. ‘My London, the Gothic London? Th ..read more

Suggested further reading Following Clare Walker Gore’s lecture on Gaskell, North and South (1855), here is some suggested reading on ninteenth-century history and Elizabeth Gaskell History David Cannadine, Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800-1906 (Allen Lane, 2017) Janice Carlisle, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (CUP, 2012) Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, eds., Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (CUP, 2000) Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Fo ..read more

On the fifth of this December [1930] Christina Rossetti will celebrate her centenary, or, more properly speaking, we shall celebrate it for her, and perhaps not a little to her distress, for she was one of the shyest of women, and to be spoken of, as we shall certainly speak of her, would have caused her acute discomfort. Nevertheless, it is inevitable; centenaries are inexorable; talk of her we must. We shall read her life; we shall read her letters; we shall study her portraits, speculate about her diseases – of which she had a great variety; and rattle the drawers of her writing-table, whic ..read more