We loved reading Night and Day in Alfriston!

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Each travel study is its own epic experience. We work hard to put together the text, the group, a special site, unique eating experiences, relevant gallery or museum visits, outdoor adventures and of course, a wild swim or two, but still I experience a healthy anxiety in hoping that all the planning will result yet again in the magical coming together of minds, words and ideas that makes these times so unique. 

The study of a book that I have not previously worked through makes this pre-trip tension even greater. For our latest big Woolf read, Night and Day in Alfriston earlier this month, I had the great privilege of working with Dr. Karina Jakubowicz, whose deep knowledge, great energy and humour made the facilitation electric. She also makes a fine fire!

Added to this, we had a core group of dedicated Woolfians – some of whom are in the ongoing diary study of Woolf – who had prepared reflections from that work that informed our reading of Night and Day. 

We were also truly enriched by our contact and meeting with the brilliant folks at Much Ado Books in Alfriston. The space they have created, with such love for books and art, welcomes all readers into the bright and illuminating world of beautiful books. They have a wonderful variety of rooms and extra buildings dedicated to different aspects of literary art, and they kindly hosted one of our sessions in the barn that houses their collection of Book Art – a vibrant response to the meeting of word and material. I value this connection greatly and was inspired by their embracing space and passion for books. We plan to be back in Alfriston next April and look forward to more events and exchanges with this very special location.

On first diving-in, Night and Day can seem like a conventional late nineteenth century novel of romantic entanglements, but our time around the work introduced new understanding as we were guided by Woolf’s probing – and at times ironic – gaze into family life, women’s work and social relationships in the late Edwardian era. In his literary theories, Mikhail Bakhtin developed the proposal that social situation and relationships determine the structure of utterance. Night and Day, positioned at a moment of immense change in the world, as portrayed in Woolf’s later novels, captures this change by using traditional language to address the rigid values around marriage, love and the position of women. But into this (teetering) order, Woolf inserts dreams, darknesses, gaps in language and volition that reflect the difficulty of resistance to a system in which one is embedded. By the novel’s end, some of the characters are stepping out towards a new world, just as Woolf herself will move towards more experimental forms of language and complex understanding of character in all her subsequent works. 

During our time in Alfriston, some of us would venture to Seaford early in the mornings for a dip in the sea to get our minds moving. As we drove to the beach on 13 April, we learned of the Iranian missile attack on Israel (particularly relevant to one of our participants, a political journalist whose radio interview that morning was abruptly cancelled). Suddenly, war and global conflict invaded our idyll, giving us a different understanding of how Woolf could have written this most domestic of novels in the midst of the Great War (a concern voiced by many critics, especially in her immediate group). We realised that with the threat of war around us (and I believe that awareness of our global position means we are all implicated in war anywhere in the world) we might turn purposefully to the drama of human relationships, where conflict can spark and glow to destruction. We also reflected that, in the chaos of the news around us, the generation of hope in human potential for progressive change is an ember that must be nurtured. 

There were so many moments of glittering insight and pleasure during our time together engrossed in this lesser-known Woolf work. I became aware of how the great privilege of time dedicated to this process of exploration results in an expanded space in the mind. Like swimming in fresh waters, the flotsam is softened and made fluid. With time spent focusing on a narrative, away from the needs of home, work and family, my mind gains strength as I move towards a healthy kind of attention. 

The study of great literature gives me an envelope within which to manage the disparate struggles of being human. There is no absolute truth to learn, but always a greater understanding of who we are in relationship to others and the world around us.

Reading Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day in Alfriston

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Just over one hundred years ago a group of artists, writers and intellectuals changed how we think of a special corner of Sussex – and a lot else besides. Here, beneath the South Downs and between the Ouse and Cuckmere valleys, is Bloomsbury’s country heartland. The Bloomsbury Group, as they became known for their London base, adopted this part of Sussex as their place of escape, to live their own lives in the way they wanted – independence, sexual freedom and a rural existence. 

Salonista and Woolf devotee Sharon Bylenga

For our forthcoming study of Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day we will be staying at Wingrove House, in the high street of Alfriston, East Sussex, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel, with roaring log fires and rustic-chic rooms, located just a few miles from Charleston House on the banks of the Cuckmere River. Here we will be perfectly located for exploring Alfriston and the South Downs that Woolf and her family and friends loved so dearly (the photos above were taken on a recent research visit so I write from experience).  We will use the Lodge at Wingrove House for our meetings – a perfect Salon environment complete with fireplace! – and I’m thrilled that my fellow facilitator Karina Jakubowicz will be joining us.

These long weekends away give us the opportunity to stretch into a book; finding together a rich weave of insights, ideas and connections between the text and our contemporary experience. As one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known works, Night and Day (1919) is a bridge between traditional fictional forms and her more radical explorations. The characters in Night and Day  probe and push against social conventions, but ultimately both text and the characters remain confined within the social expectations of Edwardian England. 

However, both on the surface and just submerged, there is another register of questioning and resistance. There is an opening out towards wider spaces, there is a pushing against the weight of the past. While the book offers us a variety of romantic situations that are not typical Woolfian fare, these relationships show fractures in the gendered spaces of the time. I find the tension that the book barely contains, the daydreams that threaten to overtake the social performances; give a vision towards the possibilities that Woolf would later expand into. It is an absorbing link in the ever fascinating chain of Woolf’s work. 

Why read Fernando Pessoa?

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Fernando Pessoa by unknown photographer, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was, quipped one critic, Portugal’s three greatest modern poets. It is certainly true that to read Pessoa is not just to read one poet but to enter into a whole literature. 

Pessoa’s attempt to forge a new literary modernism for Portugal took shape through his creation of different literary personas. He called these personas ‘heteronyms’, to distinguish them from pseudonyms, as essentially distinct personalities, all with biographies, literary styles and philosophical and political ideas as different from each other as from Pessoa himself.

Pessoa authored works under at least 72 different names throughout his life, and this compulsion seems to have been both an aesthetic and a psychological necessity. But at the centre of his most important and accomplished literary achievements is the poetry authored by the three main heteronyms: Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis; by Pessoa himself as one of that company of heteronyms; and his great prose masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, authored by the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares.

As readers of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa we encounter the works of four unmistakably distinct poets: Alberto Caeiro, Zen-like nature poet; Alvaro de Campos, avant-garde author of futurist odes; Ricardo Reis, melancholic classicist and philosophical stoic; and Pessoa himself, whose poetry restlessly explores questions of identity and self.

In The Book of Disquiet readers encounter something utterly unique in world literature.  Described by Pessoa as ‘a fact-less autobiography’, this text is fragmentary, circular, without beginning end or middle, without narrative, plot or conclusion. Almost impossible to categorise, this work may be regarded as (among other things) one of the greatest literary/philosophical studies in mood, in melancholy, in existential ennui, and their relation to meaning and existence.

What we find in Pessoa’s oeuvre is the radical co-existence of seemingly disparate and contradictory ideas; we find bold experiments of avant-garde-ism and quiet accomplishments of form and tone; we find the perennial themes of art, philosophy, identity, the nature of the self, the sense we have of our place in the cosmos. For me, Pessoa’s work captures a psychological truth of the modern age – one which by its nature resists reductionism, but in which we might recognise ourselves and our contemporary struggles for meaning. We find that in these preoccupations, Pessoa is our contemporary.

If you have not yet read Pessoa I can promise you an extraordinary literary experience. If you are intrigued, we are offering an introduction to his work starting in March.

A focus on long reads

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One of the challenges we face in the Salon is the viability of ‘Long’ or ‘Slow Read’ studies. These are designed to offer a more in-depth consideration of a text. Instead of visiting a few significant passages, the ‘Long Read’ studies give time and attention to all the richness of the writing, we move slowly enough through the text to address greater complexity and the quieter moments of revelation.

The challenge is that while there is enthusiasm for these studies — and participants find them immensely satisfying — over time people’s circumstances may change, forcing them to drop out or take a break. The good news is that there are some extended studies — for example the Ulysses Slow Read, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Finnegans’ Wake, The Iliad Unhurried — that it is quite possible to join part way through. The groups immersed in these huge texts will support and help new recruits to enjoy the meditative rhythm of the experience. Some (Ulysses and Iliad) do require you to have read the work once, but for others this is not necessary and in all cases the facilitator can advise you and suggest ways of getting up to speed before you decide whether or not to join. You can see what’s currently available to book (including more typically-paced readings of Ulysses and the Iliad, with more to be announced soon) on our study calendar.

So why not take a chance? You may find the pay-off to be increased attention and focus, a practice of consciousness that is, as Iain McGilchrist describes below, ‘the ultimate creative act.’ I also encourage you to widen your perspective by choosing a study outside of your comfort zone — dip into the classics for a new perspective, see what George Eliot is exploring in her portrayal of tensions in the social relationships and gender roles of nineteenth-century England, check out the distilled power of poetry or short stories — and, if you find you have benefited from your work in the Salon, do please tell a few friends (you could even gift them a Salon study for the New Year).

One recent Proust participant described the Salon experience like this: “ . . . thoroughly enjoying the Proust. Exactly what I anticipated and wanted. It’s the stimulus of the discussion I find motivating. I’m not that interested in the reading round it. The group is warm and tolerant enough for me to utter things that I quickly realise are wrong (a long-standing way of learning with me) and I can readjust. I guess the dialectic approach has always appealed to me and it is great to be in a rich environment in which I can indulge it without irritating people (too much anyway!) and deepen my understanding. Basically a blast! “

Another gift of the Salon: receiving reading recommendations galore! Thanks to a Salonista I am just discovering the wisdom of Iain McGilchrist, this really speaks to me of what I gain in the ongoing practice of deep reading and broadening discussion:

“The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent. Once again, this leaves no room for a philosophy of ‘anything goes’. What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.

“The best way I can put it is that it is the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists. The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. ‘Love’, said the French philosopher Louis Lavelle, ‘is a pure attention to the existence of the other’.”

Iain MacGilchrist The Matter with Things

On reading: long reading, slow reading, hard reading, reading that tickles . . .

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“I just don’t know where the time goes” I overheard this morning in the changing room at the pond where I swim. I nodded ruefully — a day slips away in the simple doing of modern life: emails to answer, writing and research to be done, plans to be made, food to prepare, bills to pay, dogs to be walked, the needs of ageing parents and the young — and underlying it all, the constant aching worry at wars being waged and the environment collapsing.

My mind feels crowded and noisy in the face of so many demands on my attention. It is easy — so easy — to be caught up in the movement of the day and reach the twilight moments of reflection to wonder: what have I done? With this day? With my life?

I step into a Salon session with lists and undone tasks still buzzing in my head, I worry that I will not be able to settle . . . and then, it happens. People enter the virtual space and something shifts as we all arrive, take a collective breath and slip into the words on the page. For the next few hours we are utterly attendant on the realm of words and ideas. It is not so much that the loud world goes away, rather that the book provides a space for contemplation that orders the overwhelming discord of the mind.

Perhaps it is the struggle with time that the book asks us to consider: how to understand its relentlessness, how to manage the unbearable weight of memory, how to live with flux. In other studies (or even later in the same book) we are considering the mystery of human motivation, how we ourselves often don’t recognise — or try not to — the true reason we treat another person a certain way. On another page, we are digging beneath the surface of racism, finding the complex entanglements within our self-perception that may evolve into a kind of tribalism.

I emerge from the Salon with gratitude for the wonderful minds I have engaged with, for the willingness of each person to go deeply into the work, to offer their ideas, to try out a reading of a difficult passage, sometimes to stumble, and to learn.

I am particularly grateful for the commitment and patience of those who take up one of the longer studies — whether it is a six month Ulysses odyssey, a two-and-a-half-year Proust project, or delving into Finnegans Wake (for however long it takes), or the ‘Slow Read’ of Ulysses or the Proust ‘Rebounders’ — these are all opportunities for a deeper engagement with the book, with each other, and to TAKE OUR TIME.  N.B. If you are interested, some of the longer studies can be joined along the way, not just at the beginning (although for the Ulysses Slow Read and the Proust Rebounders there is an expectation of having gone through the text previously).

I found this article by Christine Seifert (in the unlikely space of the Harvard Business Review) to give empirical support to what I have felt in my own work in the Salon and what I have observed in the experience of others. To quote:

“Research suggests that reading literary fiction is an effective way to enhance the brain’s ability to keep an open mind while processing information, a necessary skill for effective decision-making. In a 2013 study, researchers examined something called the need for cognitive closure, or the desire to “reach a quick conclusion in decision-making and an aversion to ambiguity and confusion.” Individuals with a strong need for cognitive closure rely heavily on “early information cues,” meaning they struggle to change their minds as new information becomes available. They also produce fewer individual hypotheses about alternative explanations, which makes them more confident in their own initial (and potentially flawed) beliefs. A high need for cognitive closure also means individuals gravitate toward smaller bits of information and fewer viewpoints. Individuals who resist the need for cognitive closure tend to be more thoughtful, more creative, and more comfortable with competing narratives—all characteristics of high EQ.

“University of Toronto researchers discovered that individuals in their study who read short stories (as opposed to essays) demonstrated a lower need for cognitive closure. That result is not surprising given that reading literature requires us to slow down, take in volumes of information, and then change our minds as we read. There’s no easy answer in literature; instead, there’s only perspective-taking.”

Christine Seifert, The Case for Reading Fiction (Harvard Business Review, March 06, 2020)

Below I have gathered a few poems that speak of the moment we are in and help me to be within the cataclysm of war in my imagination, helping me to not turn away but to be part of human experience empathically. As the study already quoted cites: “no easy answer . . . instead, there’s only perspective-taking.” I hope you too may find them helpful.

Every Morning by Mary Oliver

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha

What is a ‘text’?

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Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When I thought about an image to illustrate Philosophy & Literature, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus immediately came to mind. Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher, was a literary critic known for his work on Proust, Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, theatre, storytelling, libraries and more. I felt that a salon reflecting on ‘text’ should somehow pay homage to this great critic who was interested in the truth found not just in books but in objects, advertisements, technology, arcades . . .  A monoprint of Klee’s Angel was one of Benjamin’s most cherished possessions and was found among his sparse belongings when he committed suicide in 1940, at the French/Spanish border he needed to cross to escape Nazism in France and which had just closed.

For Benjamin, the Angelus Novus is the Angel of History. “His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet”. The pile of debris only grows higher as a storm pushes him backwards towards the future. This storm, says Benjamin “is what we call progress”, I wanted the Klee image to “quote” Benjamin, to remind us of his dedicated search for truth in all forms – from the smallest object to the most scholarly treatise. Unfortunately, with the horrendous attack on Israel by Hamas and the suffering of the Palestinian people, the Klee image brings back to our minds the despair suffered before, the pile of debris, the wreckage of human folly that we call progress and which surrounds us at this moment.

The philosophical work of Benjamin is inspiring and his search for truth in all objects and texts is worth pursuing. We are keen readers who, like Benjamin, love stories and books, and we ponder over them. Is Ulysses telling the ‘truth’ when he recounts his adventures to the Phaeacian king? Is Ishmael telling the truth when he weaves a story about Moby Dick to some Spanish gentlemen in Lima? What is the ‘truth’ of these narratives? Who is Mrs Dalloway? Who is the ‘real’ Clarissa? Reading Proust’s Search, we wonder, who is telling the story? What is that story about? Is there only one way of reading a text? What is a ‘text’? Who speaks what, to whom and with what effect? Can we speak of truth, reality or knowledge when we read? Can we speak of pleasure?

These questions do not have straight answers but, as a philosopher by training, I think they deserve a space of their own. Not that I believe philosophy can resolve them: nowadays we have become suspicious of the idea of a ‘foundation’ of knowledge.  Indeed, often we believe that philosophy is just one possible narrative among others. Still, as philosophy has traditionally addressed many of these questions, it will be interesting to see if, by reading excerpts of some well-known philosophical texts we can enrich our discussion.

Participants joining the Philosophy & Literature salon do not need to have had any previous acquaintance with philosophical texts. As readers who enjoy reading and discussing texts using our own experiences, we are ready to start. I will provide notes with background information on the authors, concepts and ideas, as well as some further reading for those who want to pursue those ideas. In the sessions we will be reading the texts and discussing how they present ideas of reality, truth, art and experience, seeking to integrate these ideas with our own understanding of books we have read and our own lived experience. Contributions from participants from all areas of knowledge will be very welcome. ‘Text’ as Barthes suggests, encompasses more than just the written word.   

We will start with Aristotle, who defined the art of ‘poetics’ as ‘imitation’: copying, representing reality. We will try to see how those ideas influenced the way we understand language, knowledge and art. From there we will move to Nietzsche, a big leap no doubt, but one that opens the space for modernist – and postmodern – literature. Wittgenstein will bring to the fore the horizon of shared practices, values and customs that surround language, writing, speaking and reading. Finally, we will ‘visit’ Paris and possibly find ‘pleasure’ amidst the multi-layered texts of Barthes, who in many ways and forms reminds us, once again, of Benjamin.

Philosophy & Literature, a four week study, begins on 25 January 2024. I invite you to join the journey.

Is there always more to say about Ulysses?

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Portrait of James Joyce by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1934, National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Is there always more to say about Ulysses? Yes, there is always more to say about Ulysses. Particularly in the wake of the tidal wave of the centenary . . . and the wonderful writer Colm Tóibín always adds to my view with his deft prose and deep curiosity.

From the London Review of Books: Arruginated: James Joyce’s Errors by Colm Tóibín

In this article from the LRB about the errors—volitional or otherwise—that Joyce makes in the text, I found myself bemused by the desire to drill down to fact in the face of the magnificent vision of Ulysses. 

Having spent some time in the text—reading, teaching, singing, researching and puzzling—it is interesting to know that we are still learning how the details of the text match or do not match the historical experience of Dublin in 1904. As Tóibín considers, some of it matters (the final notes), some of it may not. Sometimes we go off on galloping goose chases, sometimes we disappear down holes more fitting the Mad Hatter. As I read this, I was thinking about the sweet satisfaction I have in peeling back layers of the text with both new and practised Ulyssians. 

Our Slow-Read Ulysses group has found a rhythm of play in a careful exploration of the text that expands both my knowledge of the text and my understanding of what a close encounter with a great work may yield. While some of our own work echoes Tóibín’s detective work traced in the article, we also find moments of lift-off, when the beauty of the prose and Joyce’s technical mastery of the language launch us into new realms of thought—about our relationship to history, about identity, around gender play, about our relationship to the material world . . . and how Joyce pulls us in with his shimmering net of wordplay, allusion and musicality in language. 

In Arruginated, I am faced with fragments and details that may offer verisimilitude to the real world, or remind me how much the experience of the real world is always sifting in my mind—against my memories, imagination and sensory limits and embellishments. This puts me in mind of our wonderful work in the Finnegans Wake group, as it shifts and adapts to the needs of life and time, goes from digging in fragments (the middenheap with the Hen) with an eye towards the wider scapes of sky or water. This was echoed in the recent Anselm Kiefer exhibition on Finnegans Wake which included rubble as part of the installation. I had not realised that Kiefer’s home had been destroyed by bombing on the day he was born; the rubble he used in the installation was from his childhood home—he had played in that rubble, and the tactile experience of rubble informs his vision of fragments and broken pieces that gave him insight into the Wake. 

We are continuing our Slow-Read of Ulysses in a few weeks . . . there are spaces available if you would like to join us, anyone who has meandered through Ulysses is most welcome. You can do a series (usually six weeks of meetings) and then drop out and return as you wish and as life allows. We will be digging into Aeolus next: the pace is comfortable (3-5 pages p/week), the work is shared and we have lots of laughs. And, o, there is some learning along the way!

Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Why read Marilynne Robinson?

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Marilynne Robinson — winner of the Pulitzer Prize (2005), PEN/ Hemingway Award (1982), Women’s Prize for Fiction (2009), National Book Critics Circle Award (2015, 2004) among many others — is considered one of the world’s greatest living novelists. She was Barack Obama’s choice for philosophical discussions to help him in his Presidency of the USA, and she has been cited as an inspiration by many recent writers of fiction and non-fiction. Even so, I am surprised to find very well-read people who have not heard of her or who have never read her.

For me, reading Robinson’s novels is like being immersed in a mountain stream after an arduous, sweaty hike. She goes directly into what is tormented and messy in the human heart and, through her crystalline prose, finds what glows there. Robinson is drawn to the places of paradox in the human psyche. For example, in the Gilead Quartet one of her questions is how a community, historically defined by a fierce commitment to the Abolitionist movement, might evolve in a later generation to disregard the racism at the core of the American project (and therefore at the heart of apparently ethical small-town, Protestant America).

Robinson’s theology is an essential part of her vision. While this may put some readers off, what Robinson does with her faith is to employ it in her muscular inquiry of human behaviour. How is it, for example, that some of those who are most committed to a monotheistic code of a life of good values, end up becoming rigid and dangerously dogmatic in their views? How is it that the Christian values of charity and grace seem to grow into prejudice and harsh judgements of neighbours?

A recent Salon discussion around Home (published 2008) became one of the most respectful and rich interfaith exchanges I have had the privilege to experience: the group comprised practitioners of the Jewish and Muslim faiths, an Anglican priest, a few raised in the Catholic church, an atheist, several agnostics and a few who follow Buddhist principles. Because Robinson creates a community of faith that she then uses to consider how faith may be used – or misused – in translating values into living, we as a group found material that helped us consider how our various theological imprints shaped our view of the world, specifically in the realms of forgiveness, salvation and grace. As Nicky Von Fraunhofer, co-facilitator for the Robinson studies commented: “Jack’s position in the family is the provoker of questions about the family’s faith and attitudes, especially over the theology of guilt and sin. This plays very directly into the story of the Prodigal, but Marilynne extends it here, to what happens after the son comes home.”

A recent piece in the New Yorker gives a precise reading of what Robinson offers, particularly in reflection of the tormented story of American history:

Her nonfiction had taken on the thunderous tones of a prophet, but in her fiction she found the range of the psalmist, sometimes gentle, sometimes wild, and always full of empathy and wonder. “I have a bicameral mind,” she says, explaining that her lectures and essays are a way of “aerating” ideas that often originate in agitation or outrage, whereas the novels are a different exercise entirely. The essays are the most explicit expression of her ideas, the novels the most elegant. “With any piece of fiction, any work of literature, the assumption is that a human life matters,” Robinson says. For her, this is a theological commitment, a reflection of her belief in the Imago Dei: the value of each of us, inclusive of our faults. “That is why I love my characters. I can only write about characters I love.”

Casey Cep, The New Yorker

Robinson’s vision, as expressed in her fiction, honours the immediacy of life; rendering the details of sensation and thought with a lyric and respectful attention. Her view is intimate and direct to the quiet inner lives of her characters, but from that personal space, she takes in huge questions – around faith, family, homelessness, hypocrisy, grief, identity, ecology – engaged with the natural world, but always in respectful and exploratory mode that invites the reader in.

There are passages in her fiction that I just relish (I have been known to pull out her book in the midst of a dinner party and subject the guests to a reading):

“For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.” 

Marilynne Robinson

Robinson’s work generates energetic, even passionate discussions as the exploration in her fiction goes deeply into the contradictions of contemporary existence and the history we have inherited. Housekeeping, her first novel, asks us to consider how a model of parenting that is – quite literally – outside the social spaces might be right and appropriate for a grieving young woman.

In the coming months, we have several Marilynne Robinson texts on offer — coming soon, her first work Housekeeping — you are warmly invited to join our own exploration.

The Lady Vanishes – where are the women poets of the English Renaissance?

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Nicholas Hilliard miniature, believed to portray Aemilia Lanyer

What comes to mind when you think of English Renaissance poetry? Probably Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Perhaps Wyatt and most certainly Donne. We delight in their inventive iambic pentameters, their creative imagery, their musical verse that takes our minds back to a time of courtly intrigue and endless linguistic innovation. We get lost in their clever metaphors, and revel in their elaborate rhetoric.

But what comes to mind when you think about women and the poetry of the English Renaissance? The chances are you might think of the many, many women who appear in the poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and Shakespeare. And this is where we find a disturbing paradox: while Renaissance women are everywhere on paper, it’s very hard to find them holding a pen. This is the conclusion Virginia Woolf came to in 1928, on speaking to a small group of Cambridge female students at a time when, after long struggles, women were allowed to study at university but still could not obtain a degree. Woolf, ever the storyteller, cast her mind back to the 1600s to imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had ‘a wonderfully gifted sister’, how would her fictional biography go? As Woolf concluded, it ended badly.

Until very recently, if you wanted to read poetry written by women in Shakespeare’s day you would be in trouble. If you were really determined you might come across English women whose poetry survived largely because they were lucky enough to be in elevated social positions, the likes of Queen Elizabeth I, and Ladies Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. But what about the common woman? One who could have been Shakespeare’s sister?

In the last decades scholars have started scouring archives and libraries in search of women writers of the English Renaissance, and they’ve made surprising discoveries. Despite not being born in courtly circles and being mostly denied any education or professional path, some English women managed to write (and occasionally even publish) impressive poetry in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, who were they? And was their poetry any good?

I’m excited to be leading the LitSalon study Women poets of the English Renaissance, which invites readers to explore this previously silent canon and begin to form an opinion. Together we will let these poems live again by revisiting their dormant sounds, rhymes and imagery. The study focuses on three groundbreaking poets and their work: Anne Locke’s fiercely devotional poetry; Isabella Whitney’s mock ‘last will’ bequeathing London to Londoners; and the feminist poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, who came from an Italian-Jewish family of courtly musicians and is rumoured to have been Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’.

Together we will try to build a picture of these poets and their lives in the Renaissance world. And we will look to pair up their poetry with artefacts from that world, enabling the words and objects to converse across time. We will ask the compelling question: how does this poetry speak to us today?

Between the Acts – a novel for our times?

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Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, photo courtesy of Harvard University Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As I re-read Between the Acts in preparation for our first study based on the novel this autumn in St Ives, I wonder why it is probably the least-known and read of Virginia Woolf’s works. This was her last book – completed shortly before her suicide in 1941 and published posthumously – and I can’t help speculating about her thoughts and mood as she wrote it, what extremes of ambivalence and ambiguity it reflects.

In this book I hear an agonised, desperate cry against the forces – both external and internal – that were closing in on Virginia Woolf. Forced to move permanently to Monk’s House, her beloved country home in Sussex, to escape the bombings of London, she found the bucolic retreat that was so nourishing to visit became claustrophobic as a permanent home. This novel, written in the echoes of the bombing raids, in the knowledge that, as she wrote in her journal ‘each fine day may be the last’ helps us to understand the strangeness, the jagged vision of the book. The narrative is not apparently about the war, but the war informs the author’s vision in singular ways. 

Woolf’s rendering of a village pageant—the awkward but majestic vision of Miss LaTrobe as she tries to mirror back to a complacent people the enclosure of their history and a stagnant view of Britishness—becomes the central character in the book. This feels like a response from Woolf to her predicament: forced from her lively urban world into the constraints of a rural space, immersion in the ostensibly ideal village community threatens to suck her dry artistically.

Set in an English country house shortly before the Second World War, the opposing themes of unity and dispersal are invoked to consider how, in a moment between two horrific wars, people may find meaning in a changing world. These themes are figured in the characters of Bart Oliver and his sister Lucy Swithin. Bart is a ‘separatist’ by action and outlook, he misses the adventure and heroics of his previous life in India and his preference for excitement and unpredictability is exemplified in his impetuous Afghan hound. In contrast, Lucy is a unifier who brings together those around her and her home to create harmony, and whose faith speaks to her of comfort and an all-inclusive vision.

While unifying ties bind lovers and family, there are many moments in this work when those ties are critiqued or broken. The unity of vision that can be so compelling is also what underlies a fierce nationalism that threatens violence against those not included.  Unity may provide comfort, but it can also be suffocating, while the disruption caused by dispersal may offer possibility in its chaos.

Front cover of the first edition

Characters, events and thoughts disrupt the action of the novel, at the heart of which is a pageant intended to draw together the literature and history of England, as though in a requiem. The position of the play within the novel, the interaction between the performance and its audience, the scatterings of stories and voices across the production, all explore the role of art as reflective or interrogative of our lived experience.  As Julia Briggs suggests:

“The pageant expresses the need to forge a relationship with the past and its narratives, yet the impossibility of doing so at a moment of national crisis, when the familiar is giving way to the unknown . . . Living in an old country, writing in an old language, Woolf found its ancestral voices both seductive and inhibiting.”

Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life

Theatre is, by definition, a shared experience: group involvement in the apprehension of an artistic moment. The pageant strikes a balance between comedy and lament for a lost culture; it provides a unifying moment for its audience through the spell of language, just as its content tells of the progressive loss of community through a series of fragments and pastiches that the audience struggles to grasp. The title of the book shifts our focus from the play itself to the world that drives inexorably through the performance—between the acts—even as the play continues. Where do we find the real performance? How can art depict the present moment? 

More than eight decades on, I find Woolf’s evocation of the human condition remarkably resonant in our own troubled times and Alex Clark’s article on the BBC Culture website is illuminating. I look forward to discussing the book, the past and the present with other enthusiastic readers in Cornwall on our Between the Acts study later this year and there are still places available if you are interested in joining us.

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