Toby Brothers

On the train home after a week on the Eda Frandsen, the Scottish Highlands are draped with thick clouds and we rock by heather patches and lakes where you really could imagine a Lady of the Lake lifting her marbled arm and brandishing a sword. The pure, stark beauty of this landscape leaves me breathless, even though I have been surrounded by seascape beauty all week. How many sparkling vistas can one being inhale? I feel absolutely satiated from our days cruising along the North-western coast of the Inner Hebrides.

“Anything down there about your souls?”

It is a lot to ask, a group of eight people who have never met in person gather together around one big book to spend a week in close — very close — quarters on a venerable wooden gaff cutter, cleaving the waves and surviving the mad weather. Luckily, it was a very game group. Over the month of August we had met on Zoom five times in advance of our adventure but, of course, Zoom is not the heaving, lively space of a pitching boat saloon. Some of us had a bonding experience before we even left home when our Caledonian Sleeper was abruptly cancelled the day we were meant to travel north . . . there was a bit of a scramble, but this perhaps tenderised us for the coming adventure and showed us that we were able to pull together as a group and support each other.

We all managed to get to Mallaig on time to board the Eda after gathering for a final lunch at The Tea Garden. The first afternoon, after our safety orientation and assignment of oilskins and boots, we motored (the winds being unfavourable) to our first night’s anchorage, tucked in Loch Nevis (translated from Gaelic as ‘Lake of Heaven’) and already, we were amongst sheer granite cliffs and shadowed coves. As we dropped anchor our captain, Mungo, pointed out a white-tailed eagle lifting off the waves of the loch with a fish in its claws, circling on the air gusts up the cliff to its nest.

After our first morning of shrieking dips into the chill waters and hot coffee and porridge, we were in. There is always a moment – that may be hard to pin – when you slip from your home-based self into the self who is adapting and rooting into the foreign rhythms of a new place-new people-new bed-unknown schedule. That shift involves a letting-go of the safety and security of habit (or, as my friend Marcel might say, Habit) and with the letting-go, one gains the ability to manage discomforts and vulnerabilities that might not have been imaginable in our curated, daytime lives. There is a release.

Each day was shaped by that most elemental aspect, the weather. Where we were to go, how we were to go became a function of winds, weather, tides and sunlight. Our needs were minimal: eating, swimming, two hours of book discussion and moving from anchorage to anchorage as Mungo and Stella determined each day.  We shuffled around each other as we tumbled out of our cavern-like bunks, moved up on deck and gathered in the views and fresh sea air. When it was time to put up the mainsail, the jib and the topsail, we all joined in, becoming part of the mechanism of boat. Most days, we landed on one of the magical islands of the Inner Hebrides and had a few hours hiking, exploring and swimming to stretch our legs and be reminded of how land felt. I am tempted to describe the incredible meals that Sylvie conjured out of the tiniest of galleys, but it would sound to much like hyperbole. Suffice to say we applauded her fish pies, banana bread, butternut squash soup and homemade bread with enormous appetite and gratitude. 

Our discussion of Moby Dick grew in energy and excitement – in keeping with the rhythm of the narrative – as each of us moved more and more deeply into the incredibly rich text, together discovering layers of meaning and structure that are not as easily available to the solo reader. Melville’s great work is propelled by a hunger to know – to know the mysteries of the world, to probe the depths of the natural world – and so the magnificent whale becomes the focus of study. The book raises questions that resonate across time: must we destroy to understand the wild creatures of the land and seas, can we live in harmony with those from other cultures, can we manage the depths of woe and savagery within ourselves?  Melville – through Ishmael – digs deep and considers the vast realm of the sea and her inhabitants, as well as the driven men aboard the whaling ship.

It is not possible simply to summarise either the book or our work within it. Even with the vast luxury of a week of time and a sea of imaginative space to hold and play together with the ideas and language, there is always more to explore. Our final day – after a lovely hike to Loch Morar with an informal swim, we were preparing for the final discussion, the last frantic chapters of whale chase – Mungo called us all on deck to witness a most spectacular exhibition of dolphins. It was a pod of about thirty including a few babies, all leaping and playing alongside the boat. Mungo turned off the engine to welcome them and the watery gambol continued, I even glimpsed dolphins en amour.

Each of the participants brought their own energy and curiosity, and the crew of the Eda Frandsen supported us with grace and care. We sang together, shared stories and histories, indulged in libations and limericks. I felt the peeling off of layers of stress and to-do lists and return re-energised, my thoughts expanded by the wide open horizon.

Thank you Rosie, Katriona, Mark, Simon, Lucinda, Emily and Lorraine for our joy-filled adventure. I love my Eda Sweatshirt!

We are now inviting applications for the seven places on our next adventure on the Eda Frandsen (13-19 September 2027, £2,180.00) to read Moby Dick, please email litsalon@gmail.com if you are interested in joining. You can read full details here.

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 late 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.

Over many years I have taught and immersed myself in Homer’s Odyssey, from leading studies for 10-year-olds to accompanying adults from all over the world through the poem both virtually and in person on the Greek island of Agistri. Each person creates their own poem from Homer’s words and images – I honour that – and those who take the epic from the page to stage or screen in turn influence the way many others understand the work. This is why the Salon community worked to present carefully selected passages in our recent Odyssey Live! event staged in collaboration with Theatro Technis in London.

I watched Christopher Nolan’s film at the London IMAX on the day it opened. The cinema was packed and tickets had been sold out for weeks. Everyone is talking about this film and I am LOVING the buzz around it!

Many people have asked me what I thought about the movie. As a film, I found it startling, to the point of being overwhelming. It saddens me a little that what film makers think we need is always something bigger, louder, brighter. It was certainly big, it was definitely loud and it was visually stunning! The experience and vision of the film really stayed with me, it was powerful. But, a few days on, some of the aspects that Nolan has chosen to shift, or mute, or totally disregard began to discomfit me.

In our present moment – with a sense of impending apocalypse from so many directions – we have such a strong need to be able to clearly figure the enemy. Perhaps this is what prompts Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic to bleach so many of the characters of both their subtlety and their complexity. For me this is not just a male/female issue as some commentators have suggested, although Nolan’s treatment of the female characters gives us a useful example of this reduction.

Circe is my particular issue. I really celebrate the focus on craft and artistry in Samantha Morton’s portrayal of Circe, and I was hypnotised by her remodelling the faces of the warriors as though they were clay. This absolutely captures what later poets (Louise Gluck, for example) have suggested: Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men shows them for the swine they are – greedy, gluttonous and lacking in manners.

But what we lose in Nolan’s portrayal is the strenuous back and forth exchange of power between Odysseus and Circe. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus is able to resist Circe’s enchantments through Hermes’ gift of the Moly – she is aghast when she cannot turn him into a pig, he threatens her at sword point, she welcomes him as equal and then seduces him, he requests that his men are turned back into their human form, she aquiesces, and then they spend a delicious year of food, libation and love, with Odysseus’s men also fed and satiated.  Crucially, Circe is the source of the information Odysseus needs to continue his journey to Ithaca, and she gives this willingly as a good friend would.

In Nolan’s version, Circe loses all her fine surroundings and becomes a rough artisan whose skills are infused with a magical element. But at a cloying word from Odysseus, she collapses into a servile position and, after changing the men back, there is no further exchange between them. Her power is thwarted, her intelligence undervalued, and her role is reduced to no more than a brief moment in the adventures.

Nolan focuses on battles and violent encounters; these go on and on as though the camera is in thrall to the barbarism of what we do to each other.  Perhaps we find these epic film battles particularly satisfying at a time when it is harder and harder to figure out who the enemy is and the nature of the threat they represent. The enemies in my life today are greedy tech bros and appallingly stupid and avaricious politicians, not noble adversaries I can confront in combat.

While the challenge of the warrior-hero returning from war – not to mention adapting to being a king and a husband and a father – is certainly a theme of Homer’s  original; this is balanced with the meaning of HOME and the difficulty of returning to the place that is at the core of our being. Anyone who has left home – willingly or not – holds an idea of what they have lost that becomes calcified and coloured with imagination and the ache of nostalgia. For reasons both concrete and subtle, that idea of home becomes hard to match with reality given the passage of time and change. I had a startling experience recently in Estonia as I shared a table and started talking with a man and his son, to whom he was suggesting places to visit in Tallinn. He had left his homeland of Russia twenty years before, and his eyes grew teary: “I have lost my motherland.” I felt a clang of recognition: me too, my friend, although we come from such different worlds. Homer has Odysseus give voice to his recognition, in the kingdom of the Phaeacians, of a love of the true pleasures of home: a partner with whom you can celebrate the joys of shared friends and good food. The complexity of Homer’s vision is broad enough to show what connects different peoples as well as what divides. 

Narrative form is much better able to hold complexity than film, and Nolan’s enactment of The Odyssey demonstrates this. As others such as Emily Hauser and Catherine Shroad have already noted, the film’s portrayal flattens some of the complexity of character that makes the poem so absorbing, reminding us that any re-imagining of this foundational epic will inevitably reflect the values and preoccupations of the producer/writer/translator. 

In the original epic, Athena is Odysseus’s champion. She is willing to stand up to her father and remind him of the agony Odysseus has suffered, even though Zeus has just railed against mortals as being responsible for their own suffering – an observation amply demonstrated by Odysseus in his taunting and boasting to Polyphemus. However, in Nolan’s telling Athena drifts around Odysseus as a thin and insubstantial presence, tearing up and occasionally offering advice.

Penelope too is simplified: she expresses a hunger for power, for the throne, that is totally antithetical to Homer’s portrayal and to what a loyal wife of the time would do.

Even Odysseus is no longer a complicated man, rather he is a regretful warrior with a singular note of nobility. Personally, I find this less interesting than Homer’s wily and steadfast hero.

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how we wandered and was lost . . .
Tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.”

The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson (2018)

Nolan’s film has helped me to clarify to myself what I enjoy about Homer’s rich and multi-faceted text, and am thrilled that it has excited people around the world to want to learn more about the epic. I hope that this curiosity translates into exploring  Homer’s broader vision and a realisation that we are ALL complicated people. Above all, I am grateful to Christopher Nolan for making a film that has ignited new enthusiasm for a story that remains as relevant to the world today as it was nearly three thousand years ago.

Each Spring, as new leaves unfurl and blossom bursts, the Salon emerges from indoor hibernation to read Virginia Woolf in Alfriston, a village in the heart of the author’s beloved Sussex countryside. Close to both the country home Woolf shared with her husband Leonard until her tragic death, and Charleston, the rural base of the Bloomsbury group, where better to read this extraordinary author’s work?

In 2026 we mark the centenary of the period when Woolf began to immerse herself in life writing. Having tested her new narrative form in Jacob’s Room (1922) and moved on to the more successful Mrs Dalloway (1925), she began to consider how her work might overlap with the genre of the elegy, a phase of experimentation that culminated in the fictional representation of her parents in To the Lighthouse (1927), followed by the brisk and daring Orlando (1928), a work that deliberately ripped at the seams of the biographical form.

After exploring the limits of the gendered human life, Woolf progressed to Flush: A Biography (1933), a sensitive portrayal of canine existence that roots itself in the non-human world. This humorous and occasionally dark portrayal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog inverts the hierarchy of importance in which famous poets are purportedly more important than their pets.

Woolf continued in this irreverent vein by completing her only play, Freshwater, in 1935, a work designed to be performed for and by her immediate family, which revels in satirising her maternal ancestors and their famous friends. Throughout the play, Woolf affectionately thumbs her nose at the previous generation while also exploring how attitudes towards creativity and artistic endeavour shift over time.

So, our band of bold literary adventurers arrived in Alfriston from points all over the UK and North America to gather at The Lodge in the Wingrove House Hotel. Here we could gaze out (and, between sessions, wander) on Alfriston Green and out into the South Downs. Over the course of four days, we delved deeply into these two works by Woolf – neither considered amongst her legacy texts – and found great riches there.

I always grow anxious before a travel study takes off. Will each participant find their footing in the text and within the group, will we discover new territory? By now I should know that anxiety is part of the journey, and then – together – we are able to soar.

This study included elements of drama and visual art, beautifully facilitated by our resident creative consultant Janet. To ask a group of adults to create masks, don beards, capes, scarves and porpoises, and then to perform what is already an absurd play, requires an unusually game spirit. Luckily, we had an unusually game group! Each of these creative events expands our understanding of the core texts, allowing us access from a new and different direction. The play Freshwater had not become vivid for me until I watched our group perform it, and it was so damn funny! The resistance performed by the actor Ellen Terry in seeking to escape her marriage and the rigid gender enclosures and conventions of her time – yearning to swim, donning trousers, taking a younger lover – was playfully but emphatically subversive.

We found some undercover actors in the group and, in our reflections after entering the play, we gained a greater understanding of Woolf’s complex relationship with the Victorian Age and her ancestors and inspirations. Sharon Bylenga’s presentation on the Pattle Sisters, inspired by the current exhibition at the Watts Gallery, expanded our knowledge of this epoch and its unexpected creative innovators – unexpected because history too easily simplifies and forgets the narrative of an age.

Our reflections on Freshwater also opened up our understanding of Flush through the theme of liberation. Flush and Ellen are both portrayed as captive figures: captured in relationships that are meant to be defined by love. Flush yielded much more on close examination, Woolf subtly integrates a critique of impoverishment in London in the mid-1800s through contrasting life experiences and the politics of space. We also get an intimate understanding of the world of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her invalid state overlapping with larger social enclosures against which she is determined to create art with an expansive perspective, and ultimately to claim agency in life and love. Using the imaginative lens of the sensibility of her dog Flush, we enter the realm of animal understanding, bringing up much for us to consider about sensory perception, a life outside of measured time, the flexibility of an androgynous identity, and the adjustment of desires in response to primary relationships.

What is ‘one Self’? When Flush sees his own image in the mirror, the question raised is how do we know what is real? Flush is portrayed pondering deep questions: is there such a thing as oneself, separate from what others see? He presses closer to Miss Barrett – ‘that was real’ – it makes him feel complete. There is a moment when you knit with another, there is a kind of fullness, when you give up the Self in love.

There was so much more that the discussions – both formal and more relaxed conversations around food and drink – uncovered.  Our time with Nash and Cate at the wonderful Much Ado Books in Alfriston was also inspiring and expanding. Nash gave us a glimpse of their vast collection of Book Art which, he explains, ‘is not just sculptures built from books, but pieces of art made with books, for books, inspired by books, art having to do with books.’ Being in the nurturing space of Much Ado Books – feeling a part of the vibrant community of lovers of words and books that Cate and Nash have created – and making our own art there was exquisite. Between the offerings of Nash and Janet’s guidance, each of us found our inner artist and a way to respond in tactile form to our immersion in Flush and Freshwater.

I am acutely aware that our present time is terrifying on a global scale. It seems to celebrate arrogance, ignorance, prejudice and greed. I know it is a privilege to be able to immerse oneself (yes, the self again!) in a beautiful place, in the company of hungry minds, to contemplate the work of a great artist. I also know that we need to feed hope within ourselves to remain actively engaged and resistant to tyranny. From these journeys we gain a greater understanding of both the possibilities and the failings of human endeavours, and we find models of resistance as we try to imagine ourselves into the better world we hope for.

All photographs courtesy of and copyright Janet Minichiello, 2026.

For this, our fourth year of offering Salon studies in Alfriston, Karina and I have chosen Between the Acts  as the basis of our second four-day long weekend spent in the East Sussex countryside – near Woolf’s beloved Monk’s House and Vanessa Bell’s Charleston – which offers the luxury of full immersion in a complex and lush book with a dynamic group of fellow explorers.

In this book, Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to the Second World War. Edward Mendelson describes the book: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in pre-war England. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails—but something else transcends—that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.

Our sessions are conducted in the Lodge at the Wingrove House Hotel, a beautiful space in which to delve into the intricacies of language and ideas, with Alfriston Green in the background beckoning us outside. Might we create our own Pageant using Miss La Trobe’s script? We might! And we have on hand the brilliant Janet Minichiello as our creative project coordinator; Janet is working on a Book Art Project with local bookshop Much Ado Books that will give participants an opportunity to create a material response to the text.

In addition to exploring Woolf’s writing, there are opportunities for early morning dips in the sea at Eastbourne, walking to the beautiful Berwick Church (which features Vanessa’s murals), and a trip to either Monk’s House or Charleston. Wingrove House offers stylish and comfortable accommodation with a grand breakfast spread that prepares us for each day of discussions, reading, discoveries and adventures. There are a few places remaining for this study, do join us! 

N.B. Our first Alfriston study focuses on Flush, one of Woolf’s more playful creations that voices the relationship between a spaniel and his owner, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Combined with a reading of Woolf’s satirical play Freshwater, this four-day weekend (9-12 April) will also include a creative project and local adventures, as well as an invigorated discussion about the dynamic between animals and humans. We have a place reserved for the resident London Literary Salon spaniel (pictured above), who also plans to be present for the study.

Click on the links below for full information on the studies in Alfriston:

Flush & Freshwater (9-12 April)

Between the Acts (16-19 April)