Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages 

Join the LitSalon on a literary pilgrimage with The Canterbury Tales. Imagine it is spring, the rain and mud behind us, nature bursts with new life. It is the season of love and pilgrimage. We are gathered around rustic wooden tables at the Tabard Inn, near London. Tomorrow we begin our walk (or ride if we can afford it) to St. Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. Our host suggests that each of us tell a story on the road.

What an astonishing variety of characters Chaucer gives us!  We see the full range of medieval society, from the noble Knight to the bawdy Miller, the vitality of the Wife of Bath to the hypocrisy of the Prioress. The Canterbury Tales offers a masterful sense of irony throughout. For example, Chaucer presents himself as a character in the poem and the master poet tells a tale that is pure doggerel.  Finally, the Host can bear it no longer: “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee.” Poor Chaucer protests to no avail.

To truly appreciate Chaucer’s poetry, one needs to delve into the Middle English. We will do that by first reading the General Prologue in the original. Following this initial five meeting study we will offer two further studies reading some of the most compelling tales in modern English (although those wishing to continue in Middle English are encouraged to do so) as set out below (to be listed on this website at a later date).

Part I: Knight’s Tale, Miller’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale (16, 23 February & 2, 9 March)
Part II: Wife of Bath’s Tale, Shipman’s Tale, Nun’s Priest’s Tale (16, 23, 30 March)

If you have studied Joyce, Dante or Shakespeare with the LitSalon, why not challenge yourself with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the greatest works in English literature?

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five meeting study of the Prologue led by Sean Forester
• Sundays, 4.00 – 6.00 pm (UK) 
• 12, 19, 26 January & 2, 9 February 2025
• Recommended text: Penguin Middle English edition, ISBN: 9780140422344 (Everyman and Riverside Chaucer are fine too). You may also find the interlinear translation of The Canterbury Tales on the Harvard University Chaucer website useful.
• £150 for five meetings, including notes and resources.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart offers an intimate and sweeping view of Igbo life in Nigeria during the late colonial period, capturing the complexities of family, tradition, and the forces that shape communities. Through the story of Okonkwo and his village, Achebe creates a world that is at once specific and universal, exploring how personal and cultural identities are built and challenged. 

In this study, we’ll journey through Achebe’s rich narrative, discussing his powerful storytelling, his nuanced view of colonialism, and the ways he invites us to see both the beauty and fragility of human experience. Together, we’ll delve into the themes of tradition, resilience, language, and the complex encounter between cultures, reflecting on how these themes resonate with us today. 

The workshop offers a space for all readers—whether you’re discovering Achebe for the first time or returning to his work—to come together in curiosity, empathy and open dialogue. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Monday 13 and 20 January 2025, 7.00–9.00 pm GMT
• Led by by Alison Cable, two meeting workshop on Zoom + optional additional reflective writing session* on 27 January (also on Zoom, 7.00-9.00 pm GMT)
• £60 for two meetings + FREE optional meeting*
• Recommended edition: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780141023380

*In this optional reflective writing session, we will be inspired by the novel to deepen the reading experience through a variety of guided writing prompts.

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”

William Faulkner

First published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – UIysses was immediately controversial, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”.

The ‘Slow Read’ is an opportunity to read and relish of one of the greatest novels of all time in the company of others. The ‘Slow’ approach has proved popular within the Salon as our approach is not driven by completion of the text within a defined timescale, rather we focus on full enjoyment of the material.

In a typical session we might discuss – inter alia – the immaculate conception (who does or does not have a navel?), language as a tool of colonialism (and how to subvert it), space between thought and speech, amor matris, cubist paintings, Thoth (Egyptian bird-headed god), changing understandings of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s sex life, the occult, cypher jugglers, Norse mythology, the dialectic within Stephen’s head, the Daedalus-Icarus myth . . . We are all here for the tangents!

Every time I run a study of Ulysses, there is SO much we do not get to consider: I know we may still not get to everything, but this will be an opportunity to go deeper and wider in this amazing work than ever before in Salon studies. Our run rate is about 5-8 pages a week, with frequent check- ins to see if, as a group, we want to slow down, speed up or just wallow.

The ‘Slow Read’ is served in tranches of two-hour sessions – usually between six and ten in number. As long as there is continued interest, I will keep offering this study until we reach the final notes on the text.

If you are interested in this study but have not previously read Ulysses, please contact us to discuss using the enquiry form below.

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.”

Ulysses Salon participant

I offer many resources for reading around, but the richness of our work comes from the contributions and independent research from participants. This study is particularly opportune given the abundance of new resources available thanks to the 2022 Ulysses centenary, including the offerings of the recently published Cambridge Centenary Ulysses, the brainchild of Catherine Flynn. 

Toby Brothers, Director, London Literary Salon

JOINING DETAILS:

• This is the ninth section of the ‘Slow Read’ Ulysses study led by Toby Brothers and occasional guest facilitators from within the group, 13 two-hour sessions, Tuesdays from 2.30-4.30 pm (UK), starting on 14 January and ending on 22 April 2025.
• If you are interested in joining this study but have not participated in the first seven sections please email the facilitator toby@litsalon.co.uk.
• The total cost for this section with all notes and resources is £390.00, we expect to read an average of 8 pages per week.
• Please have available these editions in preparation for our study:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582

“La Bovary, c’est moi.“

Gustave Flaubert

“Quand Mme Bovary parut, il y eut toute une révolution littéraire… Le code de l’art nouveau se trouvait écrit.“

“When Mme Bovary appeared, there was a whole literary revolution . . . the code of a new art was written.”

Emile Zola

Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880) is often referred to the first modern novelist and the inventor of literary realism. Madame Bovary arrived on the scene (trailing generally negative reviews and a lawsuit for offence against public morals and religion, of which Flaubert was acquitted) misunderstood and undervalued, but Flaubert knew that he had written a masterpiece. Time proved him correct.

Flaubert wrote precise fiction in reaction to idealism and romanticism. His goal was to present the world as it really was; there are no heroes in Madame Bovary. He used clear and concise language (he wanted to remove all poetry from his writing), a meticulous attention to detail, a crystalline structure, and brilliant psychological insights into his characters. Flaubert rejected the idea of artistic inspiration, and laboured like a mole for fifty-three months, testing every word for its aptness, and reading and rereading each sentence. But he wasn’t interested in merely creating the perfect form. He entered the emotional life of his characters, feeling his way through the novel. It was written in the early days of France’s industrial age, and Flaubert wanted literature to aid in the understanding of human nature, just as the natural sciences and social sciences did. 

Although Madame Bovary is completely embedded in its time and place, I believe it has much to say about how we live now, and this is something we will explore in this study. There are many young girls today who are living completely in the world of internet influencers, lost in a dream disconnected from any reality. Will they emulate Emma Bovary in our own age as they attempt to navigate the world as it really is?

JOINING DETAILS:

• Seven-meeting study led by Ralph Kleinman
• Wednesdays, 7.00-9.00 pm UK (BST)
• 15 January to 26 February 2025
• Recommended edition: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Classics, ISBN-13: 9780143106494 (to avoid confusion we ask that all participants use the same translation during study meetings)
• £210 for seven meetings, to include opening notes and resources

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament:
with faith.”

—William Faulkner

First published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – UIysses was immediately controversial, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”.

We offer an opportunity to read one of the greatest novels of all time in the company of others. Our work with this book will widen your perspective and deepen your experience of the power of language.

There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text – book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying – but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the best way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.

The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing – even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man – thanks, James Joyce.

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader – a broader thinker – even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

Here are comments from two Ulysses participants:

“I am  thoroughly enjoying this journey. I feel wide open, exposed and receptive to new ways of thinking. What could be better than that? I enjoy the links with the classics and their current counterparts such as the agony of Sisyphus and the trials of thoughtful, surely sad, Martin Cunningham. And then Bloom with his many pockets reminded me in an amusing way of the Artful Dodger.

“The classes I have taken with the Literary Salon have been extraordinary.“

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.“

JOINING DETAILS:

• We are offering this study early in the day, from 11.30-1.30pm (UK time), comprising 21 meetings starting on Tuesday 21 January and finishing on Tuesday 17 June 2025, with four Sunday afternoon meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 23 February, 30 March, 18 May and 8 June) and NO meetings on 4 March, 29 April, 6 and 13 May.
• The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £500
• Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament:
with faith.”

—William Faulkner

First published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – UIysses was immediately controversial, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”.

We offer an opportunity to read one of the greatest novels of all time in the company of others. Our work with this book will widen your perspective and deepen your experience of the power of language.

There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text – book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying – but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the best way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.

The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing – even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man – thanks, James Joyce.

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader – a broader thinker – even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

Here are comments from two Ulysses participants:

“I am  thoroughly enjoying this journey. I feel wide open, exposed and receptive to new ways of thinking. What could be better than that? I enjoy the links with the classics and their current counterparts such as the agony of Sisyphus and the trials of thoughtful, surely sad, Martin Cunningham. And then Bloom with his many pockets reminded me in an amusing way of the Artful Dodger.

“The classes I have taken with the Literary Salon have been extraordinary.“

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.“

JOINING DETAILS:

• We are offering this evening study from 5.30-7.30pm (UK time), comprising 21 meetings starting on Tuesday 21 January and finishing on Tuesday 17 June 2025, with four Sunday meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 23 February, 30 March, 18 May and 8 June) and NO meetings on 4 March, 29 April, 6 and 13 May.
• The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £500
• Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:

  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.“

Marcel Proust

After completing incredibly satisfying studies of Ulysses and Magic Mountain, we have turned to the next big mountain of Modernism, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is my seventh tour through the Search and each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments. This fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you anything about the world you live in, but you will be surprised. The group that has made it through the first three volumes in the last six months is lively and welcoming and we may have room for two or three more participants. If you have not read the first three volumes previously, please contact us to discuss.

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships, together with what our senses perceive, that moulds our consciousness.

I’d  like to share with you part of Edmund White’s essay on this section from Andre Aciman’s collection The Proust Project:

“In these pages, Proust alludes to so many conflicting theories of homosexuality that they end up by casting doubt on one another — and on all such theories.  In fact they suggest, finally, that only the conventions of a few cultures (but not all or even most cultures) determine the definition of normality; mere convention and nothing more absolute defines the status of homosexuality.

On the face of it nothing could seem further from the Proustian position.  He starts out with the most extreme (and the most offensive) theory; that male homosexuals are inverts, i.e., women disguised as men.  this whole initial disquisition on homosexuality is triggered by Marcel’s realization that Charlus’s face in repose is that of a woman since ‘he was one.’  This is the theory of ‘the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man’ first worked out by the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868.

Proust plays with the theories and homophobia of his time – and exposes societal hypocrisies in all forms.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Mondays, 1.00-3.00 pm (UK)
• Thirteen-meeting study on Zoom starting on 27 January 2025 (N.B. no meetings on 3 March, 14 & 28 April, 5 & 12 May)
• Recommended editions: Penguin, ISBN 9780141180342, Christopher Prendergast (Editor), John Sturrock (Translator) OR Vintage Classics, ISBN 9780099362517
• £390 for thirteen meetings (includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes)

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.“

Marcel Proust

This ‘second time around’ study is designed specifically for people who, having completed their journey through Proust’s monumental creation at least once, have the urge to do it again.

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the mountains of Modernism. This is my seventh tour through the Search and each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments. This fourth volume considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you something about the world you live in, but you will be surprised. 

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships, together with what our senses perceive, that moulds our consciousness.

I’d  like to share with you part of Edmund White’s essay on this section from Andre Aciman’s collection The Proust Project:

“In these pages, Proust alludes to so many conflicting theories of homosexuality that they end up by casting doubt on one another — and on all such theories.  In fact they suggest, finally, that only the conventions of a few cultures (but not all or even most cultures) determine the definition of normality; mere convention and nothing more absolute defines the status of homosexuality.

On the face of it nothing could seem further from the Proustian position.  He starts out with the most extreme (and the most offensive) theory; that male homosexuals are inverts, i.e., women disguised as men.  this whole initial disquisition on homosexuality is triggered by Marcel’s realization that Charlus’s face in repose is that of a woman since ‘he was one.’  This is the theory of ‘the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man’ first worked out by the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868.

Proust plays with the theories and homophobia of his time – and exposes societal hypocrisies in all forms.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Mondays, 3.30-5.30 pm (UK)
• Thirteen-meeting study on Zoom starting on 27 January 2025 (N.B. no meetings on 3 March, 14 & 28 April, 5 & 12 May)
• Recommended editions: Penguin, ISBN 9780141180342, Christopher Prendergast (Editor), John Sturrock (Translator) OR Vintage Classics, ISBN 9780099362517
• £390 for thirteen meetings (includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes)

This study offers a rare opportunity to read Virginia Woolf’s famed mock-biography, Orlando, with Karina Jakubowicz, Woolf scholar and creator of The Virginia Woolf Podcast. Readers will be guided through the text step-by-step, explaining the desires, jealousies and rivalries behind what has been called ‘the longest love letter in the English language.’ There will be opportunities to discuss Woolf’s inspiration, Vita Sackville West, and to consider Woolf’s treatment of history, gender and the genre of biography.

To guide our readings, each week will feature one object drawn from the archives at Knole House or Sissinghurst Castle, or from Virginia Woolf’s own collections. Orlando is a story that spans 400 years, so each object will relate to the time period that we are looking at in the text itself. These pieces may simply serve as bookmarks to help readers navigate the text, or they may develop into talking points that furnish our understanding of the history that Woolf describes. 

The eight-session study will begin with a lecture on the background to the text that can be booked as a standalone event or as part of the whole. The following seven sessions will be discussion-based and split according to the timetable below.

Session 1: Lecture

Session 2: Preface and first half of Chapter 1, up to the beginning of The Great Frost (p. 22)

Session 3: Read until the end of Chapter 1

Session 4: Chapter 2.

Session 5: Chapter 3

Session 6: Chapter 4

Session 7: Chapter 5

Session 8: Chapter 6 

N.B. If you are interested in developing your critical or written skills, this can be done via a weekly written task with feedback at additional cost. For more information on this, please email us using the subject line ‘Orlando feedback’. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight meeting study on Zoom led by Karina Jakubowicz
• 27 January to 17 March 2025
• Mondays, 6.00-8.00 pm
• £30 for the lecture alone, £240 for the whole course
• Recommended edition: Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Michael H. Whitworth, ISBN: 9780199650736 (but any decent edition will work). 

This lecture is available to book as a standalone event or as an introduction to a complete eight-week study giving participants a rare opportunity to read Virginia Woolf’s famed mock-biography, Orlando, with Karina Jakubowicz, Woolf scholar and creator of The Virginia Woolf Podcast. Readers will be guided through the text step-by-step, explaining the desires, jealousies and rivalries behind what has been called ‘the longest love letter in the English language.’ There will be opportunities to discuss Woolf’s inspiration, Vita Sackville West, and to consider Woolf’s treatment of history, gender and the genre of biography..

To guide our readings, each week will feature one object drawn from the archives at Knole House or Sissinghurst Castle, or from Virginia Woolf’s own collections. Orlando is a story that spans 400 years, so each object will relate to the time period that we are looking at in the text itself. These pieces may simply serve as bookmarks to help readers navigate the text, or they may develop into talking points that furnish our understanding of the history that Woolf describes. 

The complete study consists of eight sessions which will be discussion-based and split according to the timetable below and may be booked here.

Session 1: Lecture

Session 2: Preface and first half of Chapter 1, up to the beginning of The Great Frost (p. 22)

Session 3: Read until the end of Chapter 1

Session 4: Chapter 2.

Session 5: Chapter 3

Session 6: Chapter 4

Session 7: Chapter 5

Session 8: Chapter 6 

N.B. If you are interested in developing your critical or written skills, this can be done via a weekly written task with feedback at additional cost. For more information on this, please email us using the subject line ‘Orlando feedback’. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Introductory lecture by Karina Jakubowicz on Zoom
• Monday 27 January 2025, 6.00-8.00 pm
• £30 for the lecture alone (£240 for lecture and seven further meetings)
• Recommended edition: Oxford World’s Classics, edited by Michael H. Whitworth, ISBN: 9780199650736 (but any decent edition will work). 

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.“

Marcel Proust

After completing incredibly satisfying studies of Ulysses and Magic Mountain, we have turned to the next big mountain of Modernism, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is my seventh tour through the Search and each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments. This fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you anything about the world you live in, but you will be surprised. The group that has made it through the first three volumes in the last six months is lively and welcoming and we may have room for two or three more participants. If you have not read the first three volumes previously, please contact us to discuss.

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships, together with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

I’d  like to share with you part of Edmund White’s essay on this section from Andre Aciman’s collection The Proust Project:

“In these pages, Proust alludes to so many conflicting theories of homosexuality that they end up by casting doubt on one another — and on all such theories.  In fact they suggest, finally, that only the conventions of a few cultures (but not all or even most cultures) determine the definition of normality; mere convention and nothing more absolute defines the status of homosexuality.

On the face of it nothing could seem further from the Proustian position.  He starts out with the most extreme (and the most offensive) theory; that male homosexuals are inverts, i.e., women disguised as men.  this whole initial disquisition on homosexuality is triggered by Marcel’s realization that Charlus’s face in repose is that of a woman since ‘he was one.’  This is the theory of ‘the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man’ first worked out by the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868.

Proust plays with the theories and homophobia of his time – and exposes societal hypocrisies in all forms.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Ralph Kleinman
• Mondays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Thirteen-meeting study on Zoom starting on 27 January 2025 (N.B. no meetings on 3 March, 14 & 28 April, 5 & 12 May)
• Recommended editions: Penguin, ISBN 9780141180342, Christopher Prendergast (Editor), John Sturrock (Translator) OR Vintage Classics, ISBN 9780099362517
• £390 for thirteen meetings (includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes)

“I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he attempts to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature. As Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury exposes a crumbling world through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness and symbolism as connecting fibres against individual interior realities that must compete for authority.

This study will draw upon participants’ questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer when discussed, enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s vision, while those re-reading will find greater depth and resonance. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque; but as the pieces start to fit together, the complex and careful planning that Faulkner employs becomes apparent. Does the work expose the depths and hidden realms of the human spirit? This is what we must grapple with in our study.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Led by Toby Brothers & John Allemand on Zoom
• Wednesday evenings 5.00 – 7.00 pm (UK)
• Five-meeting study 29 January – 26 February 2025
• Recommended edition: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Norton Critical Edition (edited by Michael Gorra); ISBN-13: 978-0393912692
• £200 for five sessions

‘Give me an example,’ I said quietly. ‘Of something that means something. In your opinion.’
‘Wuthering Heights‘ she said without hesitation . . .
‘But that’s unreasonable. You’re talking about a work of genius.’
‘It was, wasn’t it? My sweet wild Cathy. God, I cried buckets. I saw it ten times.’
I said ‘Oh’ with recognizable relief, ‘oh’ with a shameful, rising inflection, ‘the movie.’

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Ironically, this exchange between the unnamed narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and its unlikely heroine, Holly Golightly, prefigures the eclipse of Truman Capote’s original 1958 novella by the 1961 film. Whether you love or loathe the iconic movie starring Audrey Hepburn, the book is different – romantic but devoid of sentimentality – painting a complex, funny and poignant portrait of a 1940’s New York demi-monde.

Credited as the inventor of the ‘non-fiction novel’, Capote’s prose style in Breakfast at Tiffany’s prompted Norman Mailer to describe him as “the most perfect writer of my generation”. In our two-meeting study we will consider whether and why this judgement was justified, as we discuss how the author evokes character – most notably the unique and irrepressible Holly Golightly – and, in less than a hundred pages, immerses the reader in his plot.

Please note, the book contains some language and cultural tropes that are true to the period described but which some readers may find offensive today.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Two-meeting study on Zoom led by Toby Brothers and Deborah Lawunmi
• Thursday 30 January & 6 February, 5.00-7.00 pm UK (GMT)
• Recommended edition: Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN: 9780141182797
• £70 for two meetings to include opening notes and resources

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

This is what Nobel laureate Saul Bellow had to say about this extraordinary book:

“It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion, the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination … From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of consciousness?

“I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.”

As co-facilitators with different cultural backgrounds and experiences, we both consider this to be one of the greatest and most influential works of American literature. The unnamed protagonist’s search for identity in a world that will not see him gives us as readers an opportunity to try to understand the psychological devastation of racism in its subtle as well as its violent forms, and to consider how each of us participates in the fate of all humanity. Ellison weaves in themes and images from Virgil, Dante, Emerson and TS Eliot while also using the structure and transcendence of jazz to create a work that haunts and stirs to the core of our experience.

Why read this book? Toby explains in more detail here:

Includes extracts from the recording of the spiritual ‘No More Auction Block‘ performed by Martha Redbone, accompanied by Aaron Whitby on piano, in the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House on 21 March 2017. Based on the work of Howard Zinn (1922–2010), directed by Anthony Arnove In association with Voices of a People’s History of the United States (peopleshistory.us), co-presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Onassis Cultural Center New York Part of Onassis Programs at BAM. View the whole performance here.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Virtual study (via Zoom) facilitated by Toby Brothers and Deborah Lawunmi
• Thursdays, 5.00 – 7.00 pm (UK time)
• Seven meetings starting 20 February 2025
• Recommended edition: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Penguin Modern Classics (August 2001) ISBN-13: 978-0141184425
• £245 for seven-meeting study with two facilitators

Absalom, Absalom! is arguably Faulkner’s most difficult, but also his most brilliant work. It presents the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

Described as ‘hard-core Faulkner’, one review says: “The words and writing are critically acclaimed since your parents were in school. The examples of how a war can raze an entire culture’s edifice of identity are compelling, each person’s doom and curse being common among her kin and her countrymen: ghosts and sex and violence and cruelty, gut wrenching drama to challenge any soap opera or miniseries or movie. There are themes and studies aplenty within the nightmare realm of Faulkner’s masterpiece.”

Some feedback from participants in a previous study of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury:

“I am so happy to have had this opportunity to immerse myself in The Sound and the Fury in such a structured way and with such expert guidance!  . . . While I probably would have found my way there eventually, the Salon gave me a container, a holding space and chorus of passionate and challenging voices with which to engage the difficult psychological, emotional, and artistic questions it raises.”

“You can get guidance elsewhere – with a discussion group you get more of a creative interaction and that’s what to me is important and exciting . . . you’re really involved in the reading so much more actively.”

“I always finish these sessions with insights I would never have reached on my own.”

“The support to read these difficult books is one of the things I come here for.” 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Seven-week study led by Toby Brothers & John Allemand on Zoom
• Wednesdays, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK)
• 12 March – 23 April 2025
• £280 for seven-week study
• Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, Vintage Classics, ISBN: 9780099475118

“In these random impressions, with no desire to be anything other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history, and if in them I say nothing, its because I have nothing to say.”

The Book of Disquiet, the prose masterpiece by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is unique among modernist literary texts.

Even to categorise this work, authored by Pessoa under the name of Bernardo Soares, is difficult. Not quite fiction, not quite memoir, it is an aphoristic, fragmented exploration of life through philosophical and metaphorical modes of thought. The fragments of text, themselves individual texts, ponder – sometimes deeply and artfully and sometimes despondently and abstrusely, but always imaginatively – with equal weight, the profound mysteries and the boring everydayness of life.

“It’s raining, raining, raining…

It’s raining constantly, plaintively…

My body sets my soul shivering with cold, not the cold that exists in space, but the cold of me being that space…”

These are the musings of a Lisbon bookkeeper who is preoccupied with the nature of existence and who regards the world as by turns fictive, profound, pointless, symbolic, sad, written as a sort of journal. Not composed as an organised text, never completed or arranged by Pessoa (who was the progenitor of numerous literary heteronyms) this book is ‘a fiction of itself’. This makes for one of the most unusual of Europe’s great modernist literary masterpieces. A mesmerising, fascinating text, The Book of Disquiet reflects on the enigmas of self.

“I’m a navigator engaged in unknowing myself… And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight week study on Zoom led by Desma Lawrence
• Tuesdays, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
• 18 March – 6 May 2025
• Recommended edition: Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, edited and translated by Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780241200131
• £240 for eight meetings, including notes and resources

Why is this seven volume French novel: A la recherche du temps perdu – in English Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time – regarded as such an iconic work? First published in French between 1913 and 1927, and in English translation between 1922 and 1931, why is it still so admired and respected? What does it offer to the twenty-first century reader in a world that has changed so much?

Who hasn’t gazed at this mountain of Modernism and felt daunted, or wondered what could possibly take any writer more than three thousand pages and six or seven volumes to say? In January 2025 I will start leading the ninth group of readers with whom I have explored this work. For myself, I have to report that I always find something new when reading Proust and that my time in his writing has transformed the way I understand the interplay of memory, imagination, intellect and sensory experience.

In this lecture I will explain why I believe that reading Proust is genuinely life-changing and an unmissable rite of passage. Curious readers are welcome to join me!

A comment from a previous Proust participant:

” . . . brilliant, frustrating, revealing, engrossing and I am part of what has become a special community of equally frustrated and hugely encouraging students of different ages and  backgrounds. Guided by Toby we are full of insights and laughter. We read aloud and discuss the week’s reading. Time flies, brains feel rejuvenated and the weeks go by much more speedily with the Salon to look forward to. Encouragement is key, there are  no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ opinions. In fact the best thing about the Salon is that we all feel valued. What’s not to love!”   

JOINING DETAILS:

• One-off lecture and discussion on Zoom led by Toby Brothers
• 6.00 -7.00 pm, 27 March 2025
• £15.00 (redeemable against the cost of joining our study of Volume 1: The Way by Swann’s starting in September 2025)

In response to demand for our previously announced third Virginia Woolf study in Alfriston, devised to celebrate the passing of 100 years since the first publication of Mrs Dalloway in 1925, we are offering a second event in Woolf’s beloved Sussex countryside. Where better to mark the centenary of this ground-breaking book than in the county that in many ways became the writer’s spiritual home?

The centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway affords a perfect opportunity for us to approach the text with an invigorated exploration. This study will be enriching for those who have read and re-read this multi-layered text (including those who have previously studied it with the Salon) and readers who are new to the book. Karina and Toby will open up the many issues this subversive work considers, including sanity and madness, the treatment of mental illness and the limitations of medical techniques, tensions between social classes, queer relationships in a homophobic society, the sanctity of and threats to the private self . . . We will delve into the rich language and images that Woolf uses to unpack these and consider how this work speaks to us today. 

We are planning a number of events to celebrate one hundred years of this book which opened up narrative form in an entirely new way and remains profoundly influential today. A viewing of The Hours in a London cinema followed by an audience discussion is one of the projects in the works, keep checking our newsletter for more announcements.

As one of the key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, Woolf is often seen as a London writer, but she and her husband Leonard had an abiding love for the South Downs. Together they purchased Monk’s House near Rodmell in 1919 and used it as their writer’s retreat. Virginia wrote some of her major works there and the Sussex landscape was integral to her writing as she tried to capture what she saw as its unsurpassable beauty. There are a number of other Bloomsbury outposts in the area: in 1916 Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, moved to Charleston Farmhouse with the painter Duncan Grant, while John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova also settled locally.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first — ‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism — all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and enquiring minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality — and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet — a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier . . . What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Mrs Dalloway 2025 #2’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £20. Full payment may be made later by bank transfer (N.B. we will supply bank details which will be different from any you may have used on previous occasions).
• Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz
• Thursday 3 – Sunday 6 April 2025, Alfriston, East Sussex
• This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Mrs Dalloway and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We are in the process of investigating particular outings in the area based on what exhibits will be available at the time of our visit, these will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.
• We are also in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf and Mrs Dalloway during our stay there.
• £480 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs (please see details below)
• We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £182.50 per room (charges vary across a wide range) rising to a maximum of £257.50, but please check this with the hotel when booking, mentioning the London Literary Salon to receive a special 10% discount.
• Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own accommodation and any insurance required.
• Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

This will be our third Virginia Woolf study in East Sussex, a county which in many ways became the writer’s spiritual home. What better way to celebrate the passing of 100 years since the first publication of Mrs Dalloway in 1925 than an in-depth study in her beloved Sussex countryside?

The centenary of the publication of Mrs Dalloway affords a perfect opportunity for us to approach the text with an invigorated exploration. This study will be enriching for those who have read and re-read this multi-layered text (including those who have previously studied it with the Salon) and readers who are new to the book. Karina and Toby will open up the many issues this subversive work considers, including sanity and madness, the treatment of mental illness and the limitations of medical techniques, tensions between social classes, queer relationships in a homophobic society, the sanctity of and threats to the private self . . . We will delve into the rich language and images that Woolf uses to unpack these and consider how this work speaks to us today. 

We are planning a number of events to celebrate one hundred years of this book which opened up narrative form in an entirely new way and remains profoundly influential today. A viewing of The Hours in a London cinema followed by an audience discussion is one of the projects in the works, keep checking our newsletter for more announcements.

As one of the key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, Woolf is often seen as a London writer, but she and her husband Leonard had an abiding love for the South Downs. Together they purchased Monk’s House near Rodmell in 1919 and used it as their writer’s retreat. Virginia wrote some of her major works there and the Sussex landscape was integral to her writing as she tried to capture what she saw as its unsurpassable beauty. There are a number of other Bloomsbury outposts in the area: in 1916 Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, moved to Charleston Farmhouse with the painter Duncan Grant, while John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova also settled locally.

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first — ‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism — all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and enquiring minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality — and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet — a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier . . . What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Mrs Dalloway 2025’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £20. Full payment may be made later by bank transfer (N.B. we will supply bank details which will be different from any you may have used on previous occasions).
• Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz
• Thursday 10 – Sunday 13 April 2025, Alfriston, East Sussex
• This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Mrs Dalloway and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We are in the process of investigating particular outings in the area based on what exhibits will be available at the time of our visit, these will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.
• We are also in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf and Mrs Dalloway during our stay there.
• £480 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs (please see details below)
• We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £182.50 per room (charges vary across a wide range) rising to a maximum of £257.50, but please check this with the hotel when booking, mentioning the London Literary Salon to receive a special 10% discount.
• Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own accommodation and any insurance required.
• Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

A not-to-be-missed opportunity to complete reading one of the greatest books ever written in English – an extraordinary story of obsession and maritime adventure – over the course of a six-day voyage aboard a traditional sailing ship. Four online meetings will introduce Moby Dick, followed by six study sessions at sea on the Eda Frandsen, a lovingly restored and maintained gaff cutter, originally built in Denmark in 1938. This unique study will allow readers to complement their appreciation of Herman Melville’s text with a practical understanding and experience of the reality of seafaring life under sail.

“I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—and to cool the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

Herman Melville

First published in 1851, Moby Dick ranks on almost any list as one of the greatest works in the English language. Its three famous opening words ‘Call me Ishmael . . .’ together with the image of the one-legged Captain Ahab in mad pursuit of the great white whale, have become cultural icons. This grand—and occasionally grandiose—adventure tale unites the many voices of Herman Melville in a mongrel mix of epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, encyclopaedic cataloguing, biblical oratory, and not a small dose of comedy. Melville presents an insightful study of obsession, madness and charismatic leadership that anticipates many of our contemporary conversations about democracy, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and environmentalism.

In 2019, celebration of the 200th year since Herman Melville’s birth initiated a particularly auspicious moment to study this great work, generating rich responses and reconsiderations of a truly amazing book. Philip Hoare (mentioned below as one of the curators of the Moby Dick Big Read project) writes on the contemporary importance of this work in this article Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: Six reasons why Moby Dick is the novel for our times. 

“The book features gay marriage, hits out at slavery and imperialism and predicts the climate crisis – 200 years after the birth of its author, Herman Melville, it has never been more important.”

Philip Hoare

Together, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, the dedicated contemporary art space at Plymouth University. This grew into an extraordinary compilation of art and voices (Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and more) – the Moby Dick Big Read – to illuminate each chapter, inspiring and inspired by this vast book.

SALON DETAILS:

• Four two-hour meetings online, followed by six-day study with six nights on board the Eda Frandsen from 3.00pm on Saturday 5 July 2025 to 9.00am on Friday 11 July 2025
• Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Salon Director
• Recommended edition: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition 2018), by Herman Melville, edited by Herschel Parker; W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN-13: 978-0393285000
• Cost for four online meetings and six-night voyage with study sessions, including opening notes will be £1,850 per person.
• Participants will be responsible for arranging their own travel to and from our departure and end point, the port of Mallaig on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, as well as insurance to cover their trip.
• We have just seven places available. If you are interested in joining, please email us using the subject line Moby Dick 2025 giving your name and a phone number on which we may contact you.
• Please note that the voyage will involve sharing confined living and sleeping space while onboard. We do not require you to have nautical skills, but some time spent on sailing boats or camping would be useful so you know what to expect. We ask you to let us know in your email whether you have such experience and to confirm that you are in good physical health.
• Even in summer it is possible that there may be rough seas and weather, so please consider carefully whether you are likely to be adversely affected by these conditions.
• If we are able to offer you a place we will ask for an initial deposit of £100 per person, with the balance due by 31 December 2024.

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

Who hasn’t gazed at this mountain of Modernism and felt daunted, or wondered what could possibly take any writer more than three thousand pages and six or seven volumes to say?

In our study, we enter the Proustian universe through the first volume: this will give readers a glimpse of the breadth and purpose of this carefully constructed creation that Proust uses to reflect on the workings of the mind, memory, imagination and the role of art. Harold Bloom cites In Search of Lost Time as ‘the greatest literary work of comic jealousy’. Proust uses social critique, abundant detail, lyric descriptions and philosophical query to portray a sensitive young mind engaging with the world and human relationships. The narrator’s incredible vision and unique voice develop over the course of the volumes. By studying this first volume, you will acquire the tools needed to complete the epic on your own if you are inspired, or continue with the Salon study if this is working for you. We continue to ask, could there be a better moment in history to go in search of Lost Time?

This will be the ninth troop I have led through Proust’s massive work. Please be assured that registering for the first volume does NOT commit you to continuing, but even though completing the entire cycle with us involves two and a half years of reading together, most people do choose to stay the course (some might say become addicted) and find the work immensely satisfying.

For myself, I would say simply that my time in Proust has changed the way I understand my relationship to the world of art and experience. Here is how one salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

SALON DETAILS

• Nine week virtual study starting 17 September (N.B. no meetings on 1 and 8 October), for first time readers of In Search of Lost Time. Please note that we sometimes offer a ‘second time around’ study for those who have already completed their first encounter with Proust’s work, please email us if this is of interest.
• Wednesdays 3.00 pm-5.00 pm (UK)
• Facilitated by Salon Director, Toby Brothers
• Cost £300 (includes notes and critical resources)
• Recommended edition: In Search of Lost Time: Volume I, The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN 978-0141180311

A little background and encouragement:

Proust’s writing requires a wide-awake mind as the reader is drawn into dissecting the world as it is experienced and the way our minds decorate and create memories, values and paradigms of understanding. This sounds so dry, but the wonder is how deeply sensual Proust’s work is — he is most concerned with the experience of intimacy and how this dance between two beings is fractured and reimagined through the lens of perception.

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although we may be tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

A comment from a previous Proust participant:

” . . . brilliant, frustrating, revealing, engrossing and I am part of what has become a special community of equally frustrated and hugely encouraging students of different ages and  backgrounds. Guided by Toby we are full of insights and laughter. We read aloud and discuss the week’s reading. Time flies, brains feel rejuvenated and the weeks go by much more speedily with the Salon to look forward to. Encouragement is key, there are  no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ opinions. In fact the best thing about the Salon is that we all feel valued. What’s not to love!”   

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Marcel Proust

Who hasn’t gazed at this mountain of Modernism and felt daunted, or wondered what could possibly take any writer more than three thousand pages and six or seven volumes to say?

In our study, we enter the Proustian universe through the first volume: this will give readers a glimpse of the breadth and purpose of this carefully constructed creation that Proust uses to reflect on the workings of the mind, memory, imagination and the role of art. Harold Bloom cites In Search of Lost Time as ‘the greatest literary work of comic jealousy’. Proust uses social critique, abundant detail, lyric descriptions and philosophical query to portray a sensitive young mind engaging with the world and human relationships. The narrator’s incredible vision and unique voice develop over the course of the volumes. By studying this first volume, you will acquire the tools needed to complete the epic on your own if you are inspired, or continue with the Salon study if this is working for you. We continue to ask, could there be a better moment in history to go in search of Lost Time?

This will be the ninth troop I have led through Proust’s massive work. Please be assured that registering for the first volume does NOT commit you to continuing, but even though completing the entire cycle with us involves two and a half years of reading together, most people do choose to stay the course (some might say become addicted) and find the work immensely satisfying.

For myself, I would say simply that my time in Proust has changed the way I understand my relationship to the world of art and experience. Here is how one salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

SALON DETAILS

• Nine week virtual study starting 17 September (N.B. no meetings on 1 and 8 October) for first time readers of In Search of Lost Time. Please note that we sometimes offer a ‘second time around’ study for those who have already completed their first encounter with Proust’s work, please email us if this is of interest.
• Wednesdays 5.30 pm-7.30 pm (UK)
• Facilitated by Salon Director, Toby Brothers
• Cost £300 (includes notes and critical resources)
• Recommended edition: In Search of Lost Time: Volume I, The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN 978-0141180311

A little background and encouragement:

Proust’s writing requires a wide-awake mind as the reader is drawn into dissecting the world as it is experienced and the way our minds decorate and create memories, values and paradigms of understanding. This sounds so dry, but the wonder is how deeply sensual Proust’s work is — he is most concerned with the experience of intimacy and how this dance between two beings is fractured and reimagined through the lens of perception.

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although we may be tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

A comment from a previous Proust participant:

” . . . brilliant, frustrating, revealing, engrossing and I am part of what has become a special community of equally frustrated and hugely encouraging students of different ages and  backgrounds. Guided by Toby we are full of insights and laughter. We read aloud and discuss the week’s reading. Time flies, brains feel rejuvenated and the weeks go by much more speedily with the Salon to look forward to. Encouragement is key, there are  no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ opinions. In fact the best thing about the Salon is that we all feel valued. What’s not to love!”