One of the participants in our first Jane Eyre on the Moors travel study confessed that she doesn’t like Jane Eyre. She is signing up again for next year’s retreat. I’m taking this as a good sign.
I’d wanted to bring the London Literary Salon to Edale for a while. It’s a place I love, and I’d been waiting for the right literary connection — something that would give us a reason to gather here, rather than simply coming for the landscape. Then I discovered the Hathersage Jane Eyre connection. That was it.
Charlotte Brontë stayed in Hathersage in 1845 while visiting her friend Ellen Nussey, and the landscape and people she encountered seem to have made their way, in various forms, into the novel. Suddenly there was a book, a landscape and a reason to bring the Salon to Edale.
This summer, thirteen of us gathered for five days with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. People stayed in and around the village, and we had a base for reading, writing, eating and talking together. We read closely, walked, wrote, stretched in the mornings, listened to local folk music, and argued about Jane.
Edale isn’t Brontë country, though neighbouring Hathersage is very much Jane Eyre country. We stood in front of the building associated with Thornfield Hall and read from the novel. We walked out onto the moors where Jane, fleeing Thornfield and with nowhere else to go, eventually sleeps out in the open.
Landscape became one of the threads running through our conversations. Robert Macfarlane writes about the “topographies of the self” we carry within us, and asks what a strong landscape might know of us that we cannot know ourselves. We kept coming back to that idea as we thought about Jane: the enclosed rooms and open spaces, the places where she is confined and the places where she can breathe.
We brought poetry into the conversation too. Wendell Berry and Rita Dove gave us different ways of thinking about the natural world; Robert Frost gave us fire and ice; and LaWanda Walters’ Woodcut made us look again at the novel’s apparently happy ending and wonder what might remain underneath it.
And, of course, we talked about Jane.
Does she really change over the course of the novel, or does she simply become more fully herself? Can choosing to marry be a radical act? How manipulative is Jane? Is she a seductress? What do we make of Helen Burns and St John, and of the very different forms of Christianity they represent?
The red room led us into questions about fear, confinement, the Gothic, and the things a house is supposed to keep hidden. Bertha Mason proved harder to pin down. We talked about her as a character, a shadow, a literary device, a figure of otherness. Sometimes we agreed. Often we didn’t.
And that was one of the pleasures of the retreat. Someone would notice something another person had missed. Someone else would disagree. A question would lead somewhere unexpected. We weren’t trying to arrive at the ‘correct’ Jane Eyre. We were finding out what happens when thirteen people read the same book together.
Perhaps that is why our participant who doesn’t like Jane Eyre is coming back.
Ulysses and the Sirens, mosaic, Roman antiquities collections in the Bardo National Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“This show is at least one hundred times more interesting, revealing and entertaining than the film . . . and I liked the film.” Steve Richards, creator Rock and Roll Politics Podcast
“Whether we know it or not, The Odyssey is already part of our cultural heritage. If you have seen Star Wars, read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, or immersed yourself in the world of Harry Potter, you have glimpsed Homer’s work in the background.” Toby Brothers, founder of the London Literary Salon
Following the success of our first Odyssey Live! performance at Camden’s Theatro Technis in July, we are pleased to announce two more opportunities to enjoy this live event at private members’ clubs in London’s Soho: The Century Club on 17 October, and The Union Club on 3 November.
Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film has super-charged interest in The Odyssey, with sales in print and as an audio-book scaling the bestseller lists. In our show we bring Homer’s immortal words to life, speaking them aloud, as part of the oral tradition that gave birth to this epic poem. Following an hour of dramatic readings there will be opportunities for audience discussion of questions including: What is The Odyssey about? Why has it endured for 3,000 years? Why does it still speak to us today?
London Literary Salon founder Toby Brothers, who has shared The Odyssey with readers aged from 9 to 90, will be joined by actor Jane Wymark (3 November), whose work ranges from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Midsomer Murders, classicist Susanna Taggart (17 October) and Greek specialist Alexis Cambanis to present some of Homer’s most brilliant and compelling verses live. A chorus of seasoned Salonistas will enhance the performance by reading together the introductory Proem.
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.
“Ah,” Mr. Compson said. “Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?”
Absalom, Absalom is one of those books that enthrals you—the deeper in you go, the more you feel haunted by it, fascinated and intrigued. Whether this is your first foray into Faulkner or a return to his pulsing and complex vision, Absalom, Absalom! is the broiling centre of his evocation of the American South, tackling its passionate history – its horrors and its heroes – head on. The book itself becomes about how we narrate our story, and how our individual story is always enmeshed with the world we come from, even when that history is indigestible. This is Faulkner at the height of his powers – battling through the fraught and agonised realms of racism, class prejudice, rigid gender roles – showing how these struggles play out against the legacy of the Civil War and the collapse of a culture rooted in inequality.
That’s the heavy stuff, but what makes the novel so enriching is our deep engagement with the characters—with Miss Rosa, with Quentin Compson, with Thomas Sutpen—who give life to these larger conflicts as they play out their own extraordinary drama.
“You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over.”
Absalom, Absalom! is all at once historical fiction, a murder mystery, a meta-fiction, a broken family tale, a romance, a war story, a psychological exploration–and, at its heart, a deeply American tragedy. You can choose any one of these lenses to focus your reading, and still the voices of the characters will clamour for attention, demand that their story be told. Judith (quoted above) puts words to the entanglement of people with each other, how we all trying to weave our own pattern on the loom together and how this pulls and tugs. This is also a book to re-read, each exploration rewards with further insights into the human spirit.
“Good God! William Faulkner. What can I say? Certain books and certain writers knock you to your knees and lead you to wonder why you even bother to get up in the morning and think, much less write. I said to Eudora [Welty] one night that I thought of Faulkner as the biggest, boldest mountain, and I’m scared to even stand at the foot of it, so vast and frightening it is. And she lowered her head and her voice and said, ‘I won’t even visit the country in which that mountain stands.’ So that’s my response to your question about Faulkner. He’ll change your life for sure, but he’ll scare you when the topic of your own writing arises. Go with God, baby.“
Tennessee Williams, interview with James Grissom, New Orleans, 1982
There are still some places left on our study of Absalom, Absalom!, the second in our ‘Faulkner & his children’ series, focusing on the author’s work, critical heritage and the generations of extraordinary writers who have followed in his wake. John Allemand and Deborah Lawunmi, the two facilitators, bring to the table a history with this book and a passion for Faulkner’s vision, as well as an understanding that the agonies he exposes are still with us today.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
William Blake was a visionary. The suffering and injustice he saw in 18th-century London filled him with anger and sorrow. Blake recognised that the dark forces inside each of us – greed, arrogance, jealousy, fear, repression of vital energy – must be overcome if we are to live with freedom and compassion. So Blake created art and poetry that inspire transformation. He begins with The Songs of Innocence and Experience, poems that contrast a free childlike way of being with the consciousness of someone who has suffered, and now has knowledge of good and evil.
Here is an example of one of the poems of Innocence:
The sun descending in the west, The evening star does shine; The birds are silent in their nest. And I must seek for mine. The moon, like a flower In heaven’s high bower, With silent delight Sits and smiles on the night.
In his poems of Experience Blake wrestles with violence:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
and with suffering:
Every night and every morn Some to misery are born. Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.
Blake was born in 1757. He studied drawing from age ten and was apprenticed to an engraver before going on to study at the Royal Academy. Blake made copies from classical Greek sculpture and copied Gothic masterpieces in Westminster Abbey. He developed a linear style inspired by Michelangelo and Raphael that has similarity with contemporaries such as John Flaxman, but his mature work is unique, a composite art where words are wedded to images of brilliant colour. To do this, Blake invented a technique called “relief etching” or “illuminated printing”.
Blake’s personality was as eccentric as his art. His visions began as a child when he saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” He had conversations with his brother Robert’s spirit at the dinner table, and sat naked with his wife reciting Paradise Lost in his back garden. While some people considered him mad, Blake was arguably the first poet of the Romantic movement. He blazed the way for Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Whitman.
The Romantics believed in individual freedom, passion and artistic genius. They rejected all forms of repression and conformity. Blake sharply criticised organised religion, class hierarchy and the rigidity of the English education system. Long before Freud and Jung, he highlighted the dangers of psychological repression:
“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and followed with The Proverbs of Hell, including:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Exuberance is Beauty
Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
In our study The Visionary Art of William Blake we will look at Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as a variety of Blake’s artworks such as The Dance of Albion.
William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This 2010 article by Tom Lubbock in The Independent reflects on the picture and the paradox of Blake’s art: “His colour schemes are unheard of. His images are stuck in a sealed-off, home-made system. His human figures are always spiritual symbols – and in the process, his art becomes a comprehensive experiment with the human body whose only parallel is in Picasso.”
Blake also painted a series of watercolours inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy including his famous image of Paolo and Francesca:
William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Blake and Dante had very different world views, but both were visionary artists, each exploring psychological and spiritual transformation in a revolutionary way. This autumn, in addition to Blake I will also lead a study of Dante’s Purgatorio, a work considering how humans might free themselves from pride, greed and lust. After passing through fire Dante arrives at the top of the mountain and enters the Garden of Eden.
I can’t promise we will enter Eden, but I hope you will consider joining me to read some inspired, challenging and beautiful poetry by Blake, Dante or both. You can book The Visionary Art of William Blake and Purgatorio individually, but for a limited period we are also offering a 15% discount on the price for anyone who books the two studies together. Click here for details.
Matt Damon, Christopher Nolan, Anne Hathaway, photo by PhilipRomano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
On 17 July Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of The Odyssey finally reaches cinema screens, and on 19 July The London Literary Salon is doing something a little different!
Where Nolan has Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, our own tribute to The Odyssey features Toby Brothers and Jane Wymark with special guests from the Salon community. No cast of thousands and no CGI, but together we will perform key passages from Homer’s epic in The Odyssey Live! spoken aloud, as Homer intended.
“We’re excited to see what Christopher Nolan has done with this 3,000-year-old tale, but we’re celebrating the origins of The Odyssey as part of an oral tradition, to be spoken live to an audience. That’s what we’re setting out to recreate!”
Toby Brothers
Most Salonistas already know that Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are at the core of our collective cultural heritage. These are the original models for how we make sense of our lives through narrative. Even if you have not read the works themselves, if you have seen Star Wars or read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, if you have watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator or immersed yourself in the world of Harry Potter, you have glimpsed them in the background.
The story of how we define ourselves against our enemies (who turn out to be not so different from ourselves). The story of the struggle to return home (both literally and metaphorically). These are stories that don’t just shape other narratives, but also how we understand ourselves. Three thousand years after creating these works, Homer’s vision still inspires us and clarifies the essence of what it means to be human.
The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis will hark back to these origins, offering the experience of seeing and hearing the words spoken aloud, just as the Greeks of Homer’s time would have done. Whether or not you already know the poetry, we aim to bring to life the beauty of the language and highlight themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 8th century BCE.
We will touch on the guest-host relationship, the struggle to reach home, the challenge of the soldier’s return, the difference between the inner and outer self, the shape of leadership, how we learn from encountering cultures different from our own, the press of the gods against human agency . . . all live issues in 2026!
Join us for our one and only performance of The Odyssey Live! at Camden’s Theatro Technis (Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT). Tickets are available from the theatre box office with a Salon booking discount LLS15!
Portrait of Christopher Marlowe, Corpus Christi College, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“The dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival” is the subtitle of Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s 2025 life of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance. In her review of Greenblatt’s book, Professor Emma Smith declares that “Marlowe’s life is chock-full of under-evidenced incidents that are charged with a thrilling imaginative energy. He emerges from fragmentary records already fully formed: a spy, a double agent, an atheist, a sodomite.” I am offering a single session ‘LitSalon Short’ to review the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in the dramatist’s dramatic and poetical works.
On stage, Marlowe’s characters – Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus – demonstrate boundless self-confidence as they over-reach human, moral and physical boundaries, attempting to subordinate the natural order and the cosmos itself to their individual will. The language they use is filled with electrifying energy, breath-taking sonorities and dazzling verbal imagery.
Drawing on the depth of his rich classical education (the aesthetics and metamorphoses of Ovid, extended and elaborate similes à la Homer, the passion and brutality of Senecan tragedy, and the power of the persuasive oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes), Marlowe’s literary works also abound in the fruit of the humanist learning of his time, not least Ortelius’ influential atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), consulted to provide geographic precision and exotic, ravishing naming of places.
In the theatre, Marlowe pioneered what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s Mighty Line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). In launching an assault on his predecessors and their “jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits”, he provided the standard dramatic literary form that was to be adopted and developed by Shakespeare and other later playwrights.
In the LitSalon Short we will focus on the two parts of Marlowe’s first great masterpiece, Tamburlaine the Great, using these plays to illustrate his linguistic pyrotechnics and literary genius.
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:
