At this difficult time in the world, it can be salutary to confront the darker aspects of human nature through literature and experience the catharsis of Greek tragedy. In this spirit we are offering a study on two of Euripides’ greatest plays: Trojan Women and The Bacchae. Trojan Women shows the horrors of war, while The Bacchae confronts us with the Dionysian madness highlighted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy.

It is fascinating to see how tragic drama developed from Aeschylus and Sophocles through the pivotal figure of Euripides, who set the stage for later masters of the genre such as Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. The LitSalon is exploring this through a series of studies. Please join us for this encounter with Euripides.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four meeting study, led by Sean Forester live on Zoom

Sundays, 4.30 – 6.30 pm (UK time), 2 – 23 August

Recommended edition: you may use any translation you prefer providing it has line numbers clearly marked. One good option is: The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics), Mary Lefkowitz (Editor), James Romm (Editor).

£160 for four two-hour meetings

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

2 August 2026 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

23August 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm

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Thomas Mann's Death in Venice - word & imageFIVE MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY JOHN ALLEMAND, MONDAYS, 6.00-8.30 PM, 3-31 AUGUST 20262026mon03aug6:00 pm8:30 pm6:00 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJohn Allemand Type of studyLiterature, The Art of Film FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Among the masterpieces of early twentieth-century European literature, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice stands as one of the most subtle and unsettling meditations on beauty, art and moral disintegration.

At first glance the story appears straightforward: ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice seeking rest and renewal, only to become increasingly obsessed with the beauty of a young Polish boy, Tadzio. Yet, beneath this deceptively simple narrative lies an extraordinarily complex structure of mythological allusion, stylistic irony and philosophical reflection. Mann uses this sophisticated architecture to explore interwoven questions about the relationship between beauty and corruption, the conflict between artistic discipline and erotic fascination, and the danger inherent in the aesthetic idealization of youth.

This three-part study will approach Death in Venice through careful reading, examining the intricate ways Mann constructs meaning through language, narrative perspective and symbolic patterning. The narrator’s voice remains elegant, composed and almost ceremonially dignified, even as the increasingly troubling reality of Aschenbach’s behaviours becomes apparent and his psychological state deteriorates. This contrast generates a quiet but devastating irony which is essential to any reading of the text.

Central to Mann’s method is what later critics, borrowing a phrase associated with modernist literary practice, have called the ‘mythic method’. Rather than recounting myth directly, Mann embeds classical mythological structures within the psychological narrative, transforming his tale into a mythic drama of descent.

Classical motifs (Mann’s ‘new classicism’—ironic, reflective, self-conscious) function as mythic signals guiding the reader beneath the surface of the narrative as the central character becomes a figure moving within an invisible mythological framework, his personal crisis repeating patterns drawn from antiquity. As the language of classicism slowly gives way to a dreamlike atmosphere of decay, Tadzio becomes less a character than a symbolic embodiment of ideal beauty itself.

Following our three-session literary study, we will turn to Luchino Visconti’s acclaimed 1971 film adaptation and examine the dynamic relationship between literature and film. Celebrated as one of the most visually striking adaptations of a modernist text, Visconti transforms Mann’s dense verbal narrative into a rich visual meditation on art, desire and mortality. In two additional sessions we will consider how Visconti reinterprets Mann’s work through cinema: how emphasis is shifted from literary interiority to visual atmosphere, how music—particularly the use of Mahler—reshapes the emotional structure of the story, and how the film’s imagery elaborates Mann’s themes of beauty, decadence and decline.

What happens when a story built on interior reflection and ironic narration is translated into images, gestures and sound? Which elements of Mann’s mythic structure survive the transition to cinema, and which are transformed or displaced? Where the novella relies on language and narrative irony, the film must communicate through composition, colour and rhythm.

Together, the elements of this study will allow us to observe a remarkable dialogue between two artistic forms.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five two-and-a-half hour meetings, live on Zoom, led by John Allemand

Mondays, 6.00-8.30 pm (UK time), 3, 10, 17, 24 & 31 August 2026

Recommended edition: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim, introduction by Michael Cunningham, Harper Collins Ecco, ISBN: ‎ 978-0060576172

Luchino Visconti, Death in Venice (1971), is available on most streaming services (including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, You Tube TV, Hulu) and we also recommend Criterion Collection’s digitally remastered print of 2019. We will show selected film clips during the study sessions, but participants are asked to watch the film closely in advance.

£225.00 for twelve-and-a-half hour study over five meetings, to include background notes and resources.

Organizer

John Allemand

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Time

3 August 2026 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

24August 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm31August 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

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'Loosening the ligaments': A LitSalon community of writers - Block 3SIX FACILITATED ONLINE MEETINGS TO SUPPORT CREATIVE WRITING PRACTICE, JULY-SEPTEMBER 20262026tue04aug5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByAlison Cable Type of studyCreative Writing

Event Details

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

An invitation to writers of all levels (beginners are as welcome as the more experienced) — to loosen the ligaments, put perfection aside, and write for the quiet joy of discovery; to share a space where words unfold boldly, imperfectly, and in response to curiosity.

Rooted in the ethos of the London Literary Salon — where close reading and conversation open pathways to deeper understanding — this writing series, facilitated by Alison Cable, extends the same spirit of inquiry into creative practice. An invitation to explore writing as a way of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

Each block of three months offers a gentle rhythm of practice: a facilitated Anchor Session followed later in the month by a companion Open Writing Session, where you can return to your work, deepen the ideas sparked in the workshop, and write alongside others in quiet company.

How it works

Anchor Session (first Tuesday of each month, 5.00-7.00 pm, UK time):
A guided workshop exploring a theme, text, or prompt through discussion, short exercises and optional sharing. These sessions provide inspiration and direction for your writing practice.

Open Writing Session (third Tuesday of each month, 5:00–6:30 pm, UK time):
A lightly held, communal writing space in which you can develop your ideas, try new forms, or simply write in the company of others. Optional check-in and sharing at the end.

Block Pass: £105 for three months (includes three Anchor Sessions and three companion Open Writing Sessions). This block encourages continuity and engagement, with sessions scheduled monthly to help you build a routine.

Single Sessions: please enquire.

Block 1: January – March 2026

Anchor: 6 January | 3 February | 3 March

Open: 20 January | 17 February | 17 March

Block 2: April – June 2026

Anchor: 7 April | 5 May | 2 June

Open: 28 April | 19 May | 23 June

Block 3: July – September 2026

Anchor: 7 July | 4 August | 1 September

Open: 21 July | 18 August | 15 September

Block 4: October – December 2026

Open: 20 October | 17 November | 22 December

Anchor: 6 October | 3 November | 1 December

Organizer

Alison Cable

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Time

4 August 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

18August 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm1September 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm15September 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

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The Odyssey, HomerTWELVE-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 19 MAY - 4 AUGUST 20262026tue04aug5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySusanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond Type of studyClassical FrequencyWeekly

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“Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep;
Many the peoples whose cities he saw and whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he suffered at sea, anguish in his heart
As he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.”

The opening lines of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey

“This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet.”
Edith Hall, The Telegraph

Following their twelve-week study of The Iliad, facilitators Susanna Taggart and Caroline Hammond will tackle The Odyssey in the same format, covering two books per session, allowing time to look at the text from many angles: its historical context, the debates surrounding its authorship, its literary and psychological subtexts and its enduring influence on modern culture in the English-speaking world and beyond. We will combine a close reading of the text and a wider focus, including poems and art inspired by the epic, consideration of the psychology of war and return, and images of museum exhibits.

Published in 2025, the celebrated author, critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed translation has brought The Odyssey to new life. Readers have praised this line-for-line translation for capturing the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration and assonance to produce a work full of the beauty and music of the original as well as its archaic grandeur.

“The plot of The Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years. Poseidon is always on the watch for him; he is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the Suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home, where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved.”

Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Writers from Dante to James Joyce to Margaret Atwood have been inspired by the story of Odysseus and his quest to return home after ten years of war. In Homer’s telling, the world of Odysseus is both vast and intimate with the smallest details – from flowers growing outside Kalypso’s cave to the performance of everyday household tasks – rendered in vivid detail. It is a story that asks questions about what it means to be human, particularly when Odysseus has been stripped of the context that has previously defined him: he is a warrior whose war is long over, a leader who has lost all of his men, a father who has missed his son growing up and a husband lost to his wife. Join us to explore the complexity and difficulty of this central character and why the poem remains at the heart of our shared literary culture today.

JOINING DETAILS:

Twelve two-hour meetings live on Zoom, led by Caroline Hammond and Susanna Taggart

Tuesdays, 5.00 -7.00 pm (BST), 19 May – 4 August 2026

Optional one-hour session for final reflections on Tuesday 11 August

Recommended edition: The Odyssey: A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, ISBN: 9780241733585. Please note, the paperback edition will be released on 23 April 2026.

£420 for twelve meetings with two facilitators, to include opening notes and resources.

Organizer

Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond

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Time

4 August 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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“Awake, arise or be for ever fall’n”: Encounter Milton’s Epic Vision in Paradise LostEIGHT-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ONLINE, 14 JULY - 1 SEPTEMBER 2026, 5.00-7.30 PM (UK)2026tue04aug5:00 pm7:30 pm5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyPoetry FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

*Satan Calling Up His Legions, William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Step into the vast cosmos of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in this immersive eight-week study. More than a poem, Milton’s epic is a world unto itself, one with vaulted heavens, smouldering hells and a fragile Eden. It presents a realm where every choice tips the balance of creation. This study invites curious minds to lose themselves in the epic’s grandeur and wrestle with the questions it refuses to let go: what does it mean to rebel? To obey? To be free? To fall?

Over eight two-and-a-half-hour sessions, we will traverse all twelve books of Paradise Lost, tracing Milton’s visions of angels in revolt, serpentine deceits, and humankind on the brink of catastrophe. Each week, close reading of key passages will spark lively conversation about the poem’s grand themes: freedom and fate, temptation and grace, the allure of evil, and the possibility of redemption. Along the way, we shall uncover the thunderous music and daring invention that defines Milton’s verse.

This study is as much about experience as analysis. Reading this great work aloud will enable us to feel the powerful rhythm, sharpen our thinking in the heat of dialogue, and discover together how a 17th-century poet still speaks to us with urgent clarity. Participants will not just read Paradise Lost. They will inhabit it, wrestle with it, and carry its fire forward.

Whether you come for epic storytelling, moral philosophy, or the sheer intoxication of language, this study promises a journey that is as challenging as it is exhilarating. Experience or rediscover Milton’s masterpiece and join us as we explore what it means to “awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.”

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-week study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Julie Sutherland

Eight two-and-a-half-hour meetings, Tuesdays, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)

14 July – 1 September 2026

£320 for eight meetings and background notes and resources

We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

4 August 2026 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

18August 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm25August 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm1September 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm

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Shakespeare's Measure for MeasureEIGHT MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY JULIE SUTHERLAND, 15 JULY - 2 SEPTEMBER 20262026wed05aug5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyDrama FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

*Measure for Measure in Tales from Shakespeare, Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Please note that although this study is fully booked, we are currently keeping a waiting list and may be able to offer a second study if there is sufficient demand. Please email us if you would like to be included on the waiting list.

Join Julie Sutherland to explore the moral complexity, political intrigue and dark humour of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in this eight-week full-text study. Often called a ‘problem play’, it resists easy categorisation: not a traditional comedy or tragedy, it confronts audiences with the messy realities of justice, sexual morality, corruption and the abuse of power.

In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio temporarily relinquishes power to the strict and seemingly righteous Angelo, who enforces Vienna’s laws with alarming severity. As the city grapples with corruption and sexual coercion, the characters—most notably the virtuous Isabella—navigate dilemmas of conscience, mercy and authority. Shakespeare exposes the tension between law and morality, highlighting the dangers of judging others when those in power are themselves deeply flawed.

Throughout the play, Shakespeare blends moments of comedy with unsettling moral questions, creating a world that is both vividly real and painfully ironic. Biblical themes of judgment and mercy echo throughout, challenging audiences to consider the balance between justice and forgiveness, while the looming, imperfect marriages at the play’s conclusion underscore the uncertainty of human happiness.

Over the course of eight meetings, we will read the entire play aloud, examining its rich language and provocative themes to gain a deep understanding of Shakespeare’s artistry. At the same time we will revel in the ways Measure for Measure reflects both the Elizabethan world and issues that remain startlingly modern.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study live on Zoom led by Julie Sutherland

Wednesdays, 5.00-7.00 pm BST, 15 July – 2 September 2026

Recommended edition: Measure for Measure, The New Oxford Shakespeare, ISBN 13: 978-0192865861

£280 for eight two-hour meetings

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

5 August 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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Please note that although this study is fully booked we are currently keeping a waiting list and may be able to offer a second study if there is sufficient demand. Please email litsalon@gmail.com if you would like to join the waiting list.

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The Great Gatsby - F. Scott FitzgeraldFOUR WEEK STUDY, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 29 JULY - 19 AUGUST 20262026wed05aug5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Nancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

When The Great Gatsby was first published in April 1925, it was a commercial and critical failure. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries — T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein — wrote to him in admiration, but the wider public was unmoved. The novel had sold only 25,000 copies by the time of Fitzgerald’s death fifteen years later, aged 44, his heart giving out after years of heavy drinking.

The novel’s resurrection came from an unlikely source. During the Second World War, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed over 150,000 Armed Services Editions to soldiers — and Gatsby found its audience in the trenches. Then, in 1945, the critic Lionel Trilling declared Jay Gatsby a symbol of the American Dream itself, an act of critical elevation that lifted the novel into the North American literary canon, where it has remained ever since, its status as a ‘classic’ further cemented by adoption into high school and college curricula in the 1950s and 60s.

What a difference 100 years can make. The Great Gatsby has now sold 30 million copies worldwide, spawned six feature films, and — in the last two years alone — inspired two major Broadway and West End musical productions. ‘The Jazz Age’, a term Fitzgerald himself coined, has passed permanently into the global imagination.

And yet this novel set in the aftermath of the First World War — that brief, feverish interval of new money, loose morals, and borrowed time — feels less like history and more like a mirror. Jay Gatsby is one of literature’s great early architects of the curated public image: a man who reinvented himself from scratch, surrounded that invention with spectacle, and bet everything on a single, doomed idea of who he needed to be. In our current era of personal branding, social media performance, and the relentless pressure to project a life rather than to live one, this predicament is instantly recognisable.

So too is the world Gatsby inhabits: the careless elites of East Egg, the strivers of West Egg, the vast exhausted majority watching from the ash heaps in between. Fitzgerald’s anatomy of class anxiety, performative wealth and the violence that hides behind good manners resonates with particular force at a moment of historic wealth transfer, rising populism and deepening questions about who the American Dream was ever really for.

Fitzgerald knew, a century before the term existed, that ‘hustle culture’ is a trap. Real corruption isn’t just wanting more, it’s the moment you decide that wanting justifies everything else.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers & Nancy Goldstein

Wednesdays, 5.00–7.00 pm (UK time), 29 July – 19 August 2026

Recommended edition: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0141182636

£160.00 for four two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Nancy Goldstein

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Time

5 August 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19August 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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W.G. Sebald - AusterlitzEIGHT-MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY LEWIS WARD, 8 JULY - 26 AUGUST 20262026wed05aug7:00 pm9:00 pm7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByLewis Ward Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

‘I think of how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.’

Austerlitz

‘His art is a form of justice’

Rachel Cusk

The last book by the great German writer W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001), tells the story of one individual’s twentieth century trauma through the repression and return of his memory and belated investigations into his origins.

‘Jacques Austerlitz’ is a Kindertransport survivor who spent most of his adult life avoiding any knowledge of the Third Reich, including his own involvement and his family’s fate. When memory returns, the effect is shattering and seismic. At once a study of a traumatised consciousness at the limit, and a new way of apprehending (and beginning to understand) the degenerate history of the twentieth century.

This may seem like more than enough to be going on with, but as a literary work Austerlitz is so much more. With no chapters, few paragraphs, and dotted throughout with ambiguous photographs, this doesn’t look much like an ordinary novel. And indeed it partakes of many other genres, including memoir, travelogue, philosophy, history . . . Long passages are devoted to architectural history, birds, the nature of time, early aviation and religion in Wales, topics which may or may not relate to the central themes of the book.

And as in all Sebald’s prose narratives, there is the mysterious narrator, someone who both is and is not the author, who listens with respect and empathy to Austerlitz’s story, meeting him by chance over several decades, and who adds his own documentations and investigations to the story. The result is a book that is beautifully written, revelatory and ultimately almost unbearably moving.

Over the eight weeks of this study we will begin to answer the following questions, among others:

What does this novel tell us about the nature of memory itself?

What are the ethical and moral quandaries faced by both writer and reader of this book?

How do Sebald’s unique style and technique – at once archaic and postmodern, German and English – enhance our appreciation and understanding of the narrative?

What connects the author-narrator to his traumatized subject?

What role do the enigmatic, caption-less photographs and images play in the text?

What is the background to the writing of this book, and its inspiration (much has been discovered since the author’s death)?

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Lewis Ward

Wednesday 8 July – 26 August, 7.00-9.00 pm

£280.00 for eight two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, Penguin, ISBN: 9780241951804

Organizer

Lewis Ward

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Time

5 August 2026 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19August 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm26August 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Signs and Symbols - Vladimir NabokovSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 6 AUGUST, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026thu06aug6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon Short FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

*Vladimir Nabokov (1973), Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the full study of Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious 1955 masterpiece Lolita, starting on 17 September. Participants in this single meeting will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Signs and Symbols (1948), one of Nabokov’s shortest and most highly regarded stories. It’s a simple tale about ageing Belarusian immigrant parents visiting a mentally ill son who has been confined in a sanatorium for years with “referential mania” — the conviction that the natural world is speaking to him, and about him, in a coded language.

Or is it? What is Nabokov up to here, luring the reader into a narrative peppered with precisely the kinds of signs and symbols that encourage the son’s mania?

As for Lolita. I’m convinced that now more than ever it is time to read Nabokov’s masterpiece. The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist, and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamorphosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-WWII superpower that is late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

Our eight meeting study of Lolita begins on Thursday 17 September 2026

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short on Vladimir Nabokov’s Signs and Symbols led by Dr Nancy Goldstein (all registrants will receive from Nancy a copy of the story as Nabokov intended it to be read).

Thursday 6 August 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), live on Zoom

‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.

‘Shorts’ are offered free-of-charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation – perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? – to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Time

6 August 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Thomas Mann's Death in Venice - word & image (Friday)FIVE MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY JOHN ALLEMAND, FRIDAYS, 6.00-8.30 PM, 31 JULY - 28 AUGUST 20262026fri07aug6:00 pm8:30 pm6:00 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJohn Allemand Type of studyLiterature, The Art of Film FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Together, the elements of this study will allow us to observe a remarkable dialogue between two artistic forms.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five two-and-a-half hour meetings, live on Zoom, led by John Allemand

Fridays, 6.00-8.30 pm (UK time), 31 July, 7, 14, 21 & 28 August 2026

Recommended edition: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim, introduction by Michael Cunningham, Harper Collins Ecco, ISBN: ‎ 978-0060576172

Luchino Visconti, Death in Venice (1971), is available on most streaming services (including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, You Tube TV, Hulu) and we also recommend Criterion Collection’s digitally remastered print of 2019. We will show selected film clips during the study sessions, but participants are asked to watch the film closely in advance.

£225.00 for twelve-and-a-half hour study over five meetings, to include background notes and resources.

Organizer

John Allemand

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Time

7 August 2026 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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21August 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm28August 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm

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Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean RhysFIVE MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, TUESDAYS, 11 AUGUST - 8 SEPTEMBER 2026, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK)2026tue11aug6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByKarina Jakubowicz Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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*Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress by Agostino Brunias c. 1780, Yale Center for British Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“There is no looking glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?“

These words, spoken by Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, depict a woman who has been split into two parts. One (‘a girl’ or ‘child’) she knows, the other is an unknown self who is trapped by the memory of the other. That she should feel this way is quite understandable in light of her circumstances. Although she was born in the West Indies, she now lives at Thornfield Hall in England, and despite her real name being Antionette, her husband has christened her ‘Bertha Mason’ and labelled her mad.

Wide Sargasso Sea extends and deepens the literary classic Jane Eyre by providing a backstory for the mysterious character of Bertha Mason. While Charlotte Bronte left Bertha’s feelings an unknown entity, Rhys places them right at the heart of a narrative that explores racism and colonialism alongside the themes of feminism and personal autonomy.

Participants do not have to have read Jane Eyre to understand Wide Sargasso Sea, but a decent knowledge of the former would be useful. People may wish to use this as an extension to one of the Jane Eyre studies or as a stand-alone study of a mid-20th century classic. Much as it’s tempting to use the novel to read ‘back’ to the 19^th century of Bronte’s text, we can also discuss what this text reveals about the culture of the 1960s. We might also consider this in relation to the fall of Empire and the cultural aftermath of that political project.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz

Tuesday 11, 18, 25 August & 1, 8 September 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)

Recommended edition: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141182858

£200 for five two-hour meetings

Organizer

Karina Jakubowicz

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Time

11 August 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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18August 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm25August 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm1September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm8September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Alice's Adventures in WonderlandFOUR MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST, 13 AUGUST - 3 SEPTEMBER, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK)2026thu13aug6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst Type of studyChildren's Literature, Literature FrequencyWeekly

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*Original illustration by John Tenniel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Since its first appearance in print in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has enchanted generations of children with the tale of a little girl who follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole, to discover a bizarre and fantastical world occupied by equally outlandish and unsettling characters such as the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the formidable Queen of Hearts.

Alice is not just for children, adults have read and reread the book, each time uncovering for themselves new layers of meaning: social, political, cultural, metaphysical and, perhaps most frequently, psychoanalytical. For some Alice is a story about growing up, negotiating the complex rules and disturbing unpredictability which seem to govern the adult world (“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!” thought Alice); for others it’s a story about revealing identity, the struggle in life to define oneself (“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think that I must have changed several times since then”). Some see it as a challenge to find solutions to language games and the logic of nonsense, problems set by Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don in mathematics (“Sentence first – verdict afterwards” says the Queen at the trial which concludes the book); while others believe the many surreal, even hallucinatory aspects of the story suggest the disorientating effect of drug use (“What a curious feeling!” said Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope!”).

With such a wide range of interpretation, participants will be invited to bring their own interests and areas of expertise to the study, where we can create together a kaleidoscope of meaning. “Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” says the White Queen in Wonderland’s sequel Through the Looking Glass. We will try to combine six (or even more) seemingly contradictory interpretations and seek to provide some sort of meaning, even if that remains elusive and ultimately unstable. Be reassured: no rabbit hole will be too small for us to leave unexplored.

Many readers have clear pictures of the Alice story in their minds, perhaps because of the illustrations which usually accompany the story (“What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation,” muses Alice before her Adventures begin). John Tenniel’s original illustrations remain definitive, but many other artists – including Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake, Salvador Dali, Tove Jansson and Chris Riddell – have also illustrated the text. We will try to take time to look closely at some of Tenniel’s illustrations, and participants will be invited to share their own favourite pictures and other creative works inspired by Alice’s Adventures, in film or music or video game, in fashion or in food.

Please note, in this study there will be opportunities for participants to assume some of Carroll’s larger-than-life characters when those who wish to do so may read selected passages from the book aloud.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst

Thursdays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 13, 20, 27 August & 3 September 2026

£140.00 for four meetings, including background notes and resources

Recommended edition: Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 4th Norton Critical Edition, edited by Donald J. Gray, 2024. ISBN: 9781324059608. This edition also includes Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Tenniel’s illustrations and critical essays.

Tim is also offering a LitSalon Short on Alice in Wonderland on 25 June.

REDUCED COSTS: We are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We can’t promise to help but please email us if you would like to be considered for a reduced-fee place (your details will be treated as confidential).

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

13 August 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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20August 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm27August 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm3September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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"Muses' Darling" or "Barking Dog"? - the fatal genius of Christopher MarloweSINGLE MEETING 'LITSALON SHORT', LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM2026tue18aug6:00 pm7:15 pm6:00 pm - 7:15 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Type of studyDrama, LitSalon Short FrequencyOne-off Event

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*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.” We will begin this LitSalon Short with a short survey of the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in Marlowe’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.

During this 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.

Tim will go on to lead a five-week study of Part 1 of Tamburlaine on Wednesdays 6.00-8.00pm (UK time) beginning on Wednesday 16 September.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session ‘LitSalon Short’ led by Tim Swinglehurst

Tuesday 18 August, 6.00 – 7.15 pm (UK time)

Free of charge but please use the booking form below to reserve your place.

Time

18 August 2026 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Moby Dick Afloat in 2026!2026sat29aug(aug 29)3:00 pmfri04sep(sep 4)9:00 am3:00 pm - (September 4) 9:00 am(GMT+01:00) Mallaig, Scotland Event Organized ByToby Brothers Type of studyLiterature, Travel FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

Following the success of our first study at sea in July 2025 – see more about this amazing trip on our Gallery – we are pleased to announce that we plan to launch Moby Dick Afloat again in the summer of 2026 (29 August – 4 September).

“Toby is inspiring. We never feel unconfident and we feel safe to think aloud. As a field trip, this is genius.”

Horatio Clare writing in the Financial TImes (2 August 2025) about Moby Dick Afloat 2025

Places are strictly limited by space on board, so please click here to email us if you are interested in knowing more about the possibility of joining next year’s voyage.

This is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to complete reading one of the greatest books ever written in the English language – an extraordinary story of obsession and maritime adventure – over the course of a six-day voyage aboard a traditional sailing ship. Five online meetings (on Tuesdays in late July and early August) 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. Our unique study will stimulate readers’ imaginations and complement their appreciation of Herman Melville’s text with practical experience 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 the environment.

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 the article linked here: 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.

Photo: *Moby Dick Afloat 2025*, © Sarah Saunders

SALON DETAILS:

The study will involve five two-hour online preparatory meetings on Zoom (on Tuesdays in July and August), followed by a six-day study trip with six nights on board the sailing ship Eda Frandsen.

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

The cost for five online meetings, opening notes and the six-night voyage with study sessions led by Toby will be £1,950 per person payable in advance.

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 personal insurance to cover their trip.

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.

Even in summer it is possible that there may be rough seas and weather, so please consider carefully your general level of health and fitness and whether you are likely to be adversely affected by these conditions.

Places are strictly limited and we are not using our normal booking form for this study. Please email toby@litsalon.co.uk if you are interested in the possibility of joining next year’s voyage.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

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Salon Director

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Time

29 August 2026 3:00 pm - 4 September 2026 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

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Mallaig, Scotland

September 2026

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*William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

William Blake expressed his radical vision through illuminated books that combine poetry and art. We’ll study selections from some of his powerful early poems: Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Auguries of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While Blake’s poetry stands on its own and requires no background knowledge, encountering him is especially interesting after reading Dante or Milton. So, this study would be a fine next chapter for those who have previously studied Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy with the LitSalon. You can view some of Blake’s art and poetry here.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five meeting study led by Sean Forester

Mondays, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (UK time), 7, 14, 21, 28 September and 5 October

Please purchase facsimile editions of Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with Blake’s illuminated manuscripts in full colour. The texts are also available free online at the Blake Archive.

£200 for five two-hour meetings

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

7 September 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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14September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm21September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm28September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm5October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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The Oresteia - AeschylusSEVEN MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 8 SEPTEMBER - 20 OCTOBER2026tue08sep6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySusanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond Type of studyClassical FrequencyWeekly

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*Orestes Pursued by the Furies, John Singer Sargent, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

In the Oresteia trilogy Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the House of Atreus, the royal family of Mycenae. One of the supreme productions of all literature, it deals with two great themes: the retribution of crime and the inheritance of evil.

The Oresteia is the only complete trilogy to have survived from Ancient Greece. Like The Odyssey it depicts the aftermath of the Trojan War and the homecoming of the fighters. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution. The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death. In The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, the Oresteia is a compelling tragedy exploring the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society.

To study these plays as a group is to experience both the familiarity and the strangeness of the ancient world. The plays that Athenians crowded into theatres to watch show people who are profoundly different to us in their outlook, but also startlingly like us in their conflicts and desires.

Translator Sarah Ruden is a writer, translator and classical scholar who brings a fresh and accessible approach to the Oresteia. Considered a leading interpreter of ancient literature, her publications include poetry, essays and an acclaimed biography of Virgil.

Praise for The Greek Plays:

“Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm deftly have gathered strong new translations from Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Emily Wilson, as well as from Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm themselves. There is a freshness and pungency in these new translations that should last a long time. I admire also the introductions to the plays and the biographies and annotations provided. Closing essays by five distinguished classicists—the brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn and the equally skilled David Rosenbloom, Joshua Billings, Mary-Kay Gamel, and Gregory Hays—all enlightened me. This seems to me a helpful light into our gathering darkness.”

Harold Bloom

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven two-hour meetings live on Zoom, from 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time) on consecutive Tuesdays from 8 September to 20 October led by Susanna Taggart and Caroline Hammond

Recommended edition: The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Ballantine Books, ISBN: 978-0-8129-8309-8

£280 for 7 meetings with two facilitators, to include opening notes and resources.

Organizer

Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond

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Time

8 September 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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15September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm22September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm29September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm6October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm13October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm20October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Why Read Dante? - A LitSalon ShortSINGLE MEETING 'LITSALON SHORT' LED BY SEAN FORESTER & TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM2026wed09sep6:00 pm7:30 pm6:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester & Tim Swinglehurst Type of studyLitSalon Short, Poetry FrequencyOne-off Event

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*Albert Maignan, Dante Meeting Matilda, Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons*

Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the masterpieces of world literature, an epic that brings together compelling characters and vivid imagery while exploring the big questions: the meaning of our lives and the nature of good and evil.

In this LitSalon Short, Sean Forester and Tim Swinglehurst will share their love of Dante. The poem is divided into three parts, but you can begin with any one of them: Purgatorio this autumn which Sean will facilitate or Paradiso in 2027 led by Tim. The Divine Comedy is a perfect work to study with the Literary Salon. Like Joyce, Dante has many layers of history, mythology, philosophy and theology, and can be challenging to appreciate fully when reading alone. Please join us for this free event to see if reading Dante might be for you.

JOINING DETAILS:

Free LitSalon Short with Sean Forester and Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom.

Wednesday 9 September, 6.00-7.30 pm (UK time).

There is no charge for this study but please use the form below to book your place.

Organizer

Sean Forester & Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

9 September 2026 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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The Oresteia - Aeschylus (second study)SEVEN MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 10 SEPTEMBER - 22 OCTOBER2026thu10sep5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySusanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond Type of studyClassical FrequencyWeekly

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Praise for The Greek Plays:

“Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm deftly have gathered strong new translations from Frank Nisetich, Sarah Ruden, Rachel Kitzinger, Emily Wilson, as well as from Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm themselves. There is a freshness and pungency in these new translations that should last a long time. I admire also the introductions to the plays and the biographies and annotations provided. Closing essays by five distinguished classicists—the brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn and the equally skilled David Rosenbloom, Joshua Billings, Mary-Kay Gamel, and Gregory Hays—all enlightened me. This seems to me a helpful light into our gathering darkness.”

Harold Bloom

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven two-hour meetings live on Zoom, from 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time) on consecutive Thursdays from 10 September to 22 October led by Susanna Taggart and Caroline Hammond

Recommended edition: The Greek Plays- Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Ballantine Books, ISBN: 978-0-8129-8309-8

£280 for 7 meetings with two facilitators, to include opening notes and resources.

Organizer

Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond

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Time

10 September 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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17September 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm24September 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm1October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm8October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm15October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm22October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1FIVE MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST, WEDNESDAY 16 SEPTEMBER - 14 OCTOBER, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026wed16sep6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst Type of studyDrama FrequencyWeekly

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“Tamburlaine the Great.

Who, from a Scythian Shepherd

by his rare and wonderful Conquests

became a most puissant and mightye Monarque,

And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was termed

The Scourge of God.”

So reads the 1590 title page of the printed version of recent smash hits on the Elizabethan stage, the two parts of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Nothing was to be the same again. As Professor Stephen Greenblatt has written in his recent monograph on Marlowe (Dark Renaissance, 2025), “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theatre is pre- and post-Tamburlaine. Most literary innovation is incremental; it is rare for a work of art to change everything so quickly and decisively. But Tamburlaine is one of those rare instances.”

The plays plot the career of Tamburlaine, who from his origins as a humble shepherd conquers the mighty empires of Persia and Turkey and makes inroads into Europe, a trajectory encompassing the most horrific acts of cruelty and barbarity, yet all done to the accompaniment of the most extraordinary language.

Tamburlaine established unrhymed iambic pentameter (what we now call blank verse) as the dominant form for English drama, a form adopted and developed by Marlowe’s contemporary Shakespeare. Here was a fresh verbal music to ravish the ears of Elizabethan audiences, with its “high astounding terms” and pyrotechnical rhetorical flourishes, but also a form capable of expressing tender intimacy and labyrinthine inward reflection. The language of Tamburlaine is exotic and intoxicating, incorporating spellbinding repetitions of words and names – Zenocrate, Usumcasane, Persepolis – it is a thrill to read aloud, and there will be plenty of opportunities to do this during the study.

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a character who provokes varied reactions and questions. Is he a conquering hero or a bloodthirsty tyrant? Are we meant to respond to him with horrified revulsion or vicarious pleasure, ravished by his language and superhuman energy and daring? Here is a man of unlimited aspiration, unconstrained power and an inhuman consistency of purpose, a progenitor of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Milton’s Satan and Melville’s Ahab, an analogue for many real-life political leaders, even in our own times.

In this study we will read through Part 1 of Tamburlaine. If there is interest, we will follow with the sequel, in which “Tamburlaine the scourge of God must die”.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst

Wednesdays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 16, 23, 30 September & 7, 14 October 2026

Recommended edition: Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Anthony B. Dawson, Methuen Drama (UK), 2003. ISBN: 978-0-7136-6814-8.

£175.00 for five meetings, including background notes and resources.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

16 September 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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23September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm30September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm7October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm14October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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The Emigrants - W.G. SebaldEIGHT MEETING STUDY LIVE ON ZOOM, 16 SEPTEMBER - 4 NOVEMBER 20262026wed16sep7:00 pm9:00 pm7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByLewis Ward Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

‘they are ever returning to us, the dead’

‘I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where’

W. G. Sebald’s late twentieth-century masterpieces exist at the borderline of the novel form. The combination of memoir, historical account, travelogue and fiction pushes the very boundaries of genre. But Sebald’s use of a narrator with some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the narrative, enables an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history, and current and previous generations.

This study will explore Sebald’s achievement through a close reading of his 1995 novel The Emigrants (first published in German as Die Ausgewanderten in 1993). The second of his great prose narratives, this haunting, melancholic work, on its simplest level, narrates the lives of four displaced victims of modern European history.

But on closer reading the text is much more complicated. Sebald created what he called a ‘periscopic’ narrative style in order to memorialise the lives of the lost and forgotten, the traumatised and the victims of persecution. His ambiguous but always tender narrator listens and bears witness, but also draws attention to many problems of memory, such as the authenticity of documentary evidence or testimony; the affliction of amnesia and what happens when memories return; and the ethical risks of imagining the lives of others.

At the same time his persona can be a drily amusing figure, reminiscent of A.A. Milne’s ‘Eeyore’ in his unrelentingly melancholic view of events which, as we will see, are not always what ‘really’ happened to Sebald the author during his wanderings and researches.

Over the eight weeks of this study we will begin to answer the following questions (among others):

What deep or uncomfortable truths of the human condition does this book reveal, which might also apply to the non-emigrants among us?

Who is the narrator, and what is his relation to Sebald himself?

Who are the people described in the book? Where does fact and biography end and fiction and speculation begin?

What is the role of the enigmatic, caption-less photographs dotted throughout the text?

Read Lewis Ward’s blog post Why read Sebald? for more background .

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight week study of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants led by Lewis Ward (on Zoom)

Wednesdays, 7.00 – 9.00 pm (UK), 16 September – 4 November 2026

Recommended edition: Vintage Classics, ISBN: 9780099448884

£280 for eight two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Lewis Ward

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Time

16 September 2026 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Shakespeare's Sonnets - A Slow Read #13SINGLE SESSION STUDY, 17 SEPTEMBER 2026, 5-7.00 PM (UK TIME)2026thu17sep5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyPoetry FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

This is the thirteenth in a series of single session studies on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Participants are welcome to join as few or many sessions as they please.

“For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”

from Sonnet 94

Shakespeare’s sonnets have inspired, fascinated and disturbed readers for centuries. Full of mystery and imagination, they dazzle us even as they drive us mad: Who is the fair youth to whom so many of these sonnets are addressed? Who is the dark lady, the complex beloved of so many others? Who is the rival poet and what power does he possess? Are these lyric expressions of tortured love – among other themes – the key to understanding the mysterious life of Shakespeare, or are they not autobiographical at all?

Through close analysis and hands-on interpretive work, we will examine Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic exploration of his speaker’s romantic and tortured feelings and experiences.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single two-hour meeting led by Dr Julie Sutherland on Zoom

Thursday 17 September 2026, 5.00 – 7.00 pm (BST)

Session #13 – Sonnets 91, 94 & 97

£30.00 for two-hour study

We are offering these self-contained, individual studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a workshop style setting. Over time we will cover a broad selection of the 154 sonnets that comprise Shakespeare’s celebrated sequence. Participants are invited to join as few or many sessions as they please.

Before the session, Julie Sutherland will send links to online versions or attach specific copies for discussion. It is highly recommended that you print these off before joining this hands-on session. If you have a printed edition, please also have it ready so we can consider variations between texts. Have a notebook and pencil on hand as well!

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

17 September 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Lolita by Vladimir NabokovEIGHT MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 17 SEPTEMBER - 5 NOVEMBER2026thu17sep6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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Now more than ever it seems right to read Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita (1955). The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

The immigrant, the scientist and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamorphosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-World War II superpower that was late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

17 September – 5 November 2026

Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time)

£320 for eight two-hour meetings

Recommended edition The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000): ISBN: 978-0141185040

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

17 September 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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24September 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm1October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm8October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm15October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm22October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm29October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm5November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (early)THIRTEEN WEEK STUDY, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & SARAH SNOXALL LIVE ON ZOOM, 22 SEPTEMBER - 15 DECEMBER, 12.00-2.00 PM (UK TIME)2026tue22sep12:00 pm2:00 pm12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain is often grouped with two other giant literary classics, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Together these works are seen as the formative novels of the Modernist era.

A first dip into the text of The Magic Mountain reveals an accessible, lilting narrative in which readers soon find themselves considering time, society, passion and memory from the particular perspective of an invalid needing medical care in an environment far removed from regular life. But we are not concerned solely with the beauty of the prose, but about the power and seduction of the realm of the mind.

Unlike some books we study in the Salon, the challenge of reading The Magic Mountain lies not just in decoding and teasing out the themes, patterns and narrative play (although we do have a VERY playful narrator), but in grasping mountainous ideas: philosophies, paradigms and approaches to constructing our lives in purposeful ways. Do we aim for the purity of transcendent music? Do we indulge in the decadence of the senses when we recognise the limits of time? Do we try to catalogue suffering and thus reveal the beautiful rationality of humankind and our ability to overcome the pain of living? All this is considered from the rarefied perspective of this mountain retreat, a Swiss Sanatorium on the verge of the First World War.

Often funny, occasionally erotic, moments of the fantastical clash with the absurd, feasts, suicides, seances and war . . . it is a packed book that is also deeply political. Written between the First and Second World Wars, The Magic Mountain engages with questions of nationalism and nostalgia, with the shadow of future events shifting the weight of the ironic stance that Mann assumes.

A little knowledge of some of the German and Austrian thinkers whose fingerprints can be found in the pages – Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, Heidegger – can be helpful but is not necessary for a thoroughly satisfying read. During the course of this study we will invite Keith Fosbrook to share a little of his expertise in this area with the group.

JOINING DETAILS:

Thirteen week study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall with additional contribution from Keith Fosbrook.

Tuesdays, 12.00-2.00 pm (UK time), 22 September – 15 December 2026 (except for the second meeting in the series which will be from 12.00-2.00 pm on Wednesday 30 September).

We are also offering a later study (on Tuesdays only) from 22 September – 15 December 2026, 5.30-7.30 pm.

Recommended editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1857152890.

£490 for thirteen-week study.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Time

22 September 2026 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

30September 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm6October 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm13October 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm20October 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm27October 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm3November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm10November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm17November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm24November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm1December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm8December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm15December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

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The Magic Mountain - Thomas MannTHIRTEEN WEEK STUDY, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & SARAH SNOXALL LIVE ON ZOOM, 22 SEPTEMBER - 15 DECEMBER 20262026tue22sep5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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JOINING DETAILS:

Thirteen week study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall with additional contribution from Keith Fosbrook.

Tuesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time), 22 September – 15 December 2026. Please note that there is also an earlier study from 12.00 noon-2.00 pm (UK time) on the same dates.

Recommended editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1857152890.

£490 for thirteen-week study.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Time

22 September 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

29September 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm6October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm13October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm20October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm27October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm3November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm10November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm17November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm24November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm1December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm8December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm15December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Paradise Lost, Book 1: A Slow ReadTHREE MEETING STUDY LED BY JULIE SUTHERLAND LIVE ON ZOOM, 22 SEPTEMBER-6 OCTOBER, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026tue22sep6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

*Adam and Eve by George Hayter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“What, though the field be lost?

All is not lost.”

Join Dr. Julie Sutherland in an engaging and rewarding study of Book I of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the opening movement of a mind-stretching epic that traces Satan’s quest for revenge against the Creator through the temptation of Adam and Eve.

This study follows the twice-sold-out London Literary Salon exploration of the entire epic, after which many participants expressed a desire to linger over every line. By focusing on a single book, we will have the opportunity to do exactly that: slowing down to appreciate the richness, complexity and cinematic beauty of Milton’s verse.

This immersive study is structured as a shared reading experience, where participants will read every line of the fascinating book aloud, pausing regularly for discussion. Along the way, we will explore Milton’s portrayal of Satan and the fallen angels, the epic’s opening vision of Hell, and some of the poem’s central themes, including freedom, rebellion, authority and ambition.

JOINING DETAILS:

Three-meeting study led by Dr Julie Sutherland live on Zoom

Tuesdays 22 and 29 September and 6 October, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£120.00 for three meetings

We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

22 September 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

29September 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm6October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Roman Fever by Edith Wharton - A LitSalon ShortSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 23 SEPTEMBER, 5.00-6.30 PM (UK TIME)2026wed23sep5:00 pm6:30 pm5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon Short FrequencyOne-off Event

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*Portrait of Edith Wharton by Edward Harrison May, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the six-meeting study of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, starting 21 October 2026, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Roman Fever (1934), one of Wharton’s most perfectly constructed stories — and, at eight pages, one of the most efficient. Two wealthy American widows, old friends and old rivals, sit on a Roman terrace watching their daughters. Over the course of an afternoon conversation, a buried secret surfaces. The ending is one of the great last lines in the American short story.

Wharton understood, as only an insider could, that in a world where women’s power is almost entirely social, silence is not passivity. It is strategy.

As for The Age of Innocence. Published in 1920 — the same year American women won the right to vote — it is set in a world Wharton knew from the inside: Old New York society, a closed world of inherited money and rigid ritual revolving around the unspoken rule that nothing shall ever, under any circumstances, be said plainly. What cannot be acknowledged cannot threaten. What cannot be named cannot exist. She knew that the real cost of a society built on appearances isn’t borne by the people who break the rules. It’s borne by the people who keep them.

Our six-meeting study of The Age of Innocence begins on Wednesday 21 October 2026.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short on Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story is available free online via the linked text above.

Wednesday 23 September, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK time), live on Zoom

‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.

Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

23 September 2026 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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The Odyssey in ArtSINGLE SESSION STUDY LED BY SEAN FORESTER LIVE ON ZOOM2026thu24sep5:30 pm8:00 pm5:30 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) Type of studyArt & literature FrequencyOne-off Event

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – four day study in St Ives 20262026sat26sep(sep 26)5:00 pmtue29(sep 29)12:00 pm5:00 pm - 12:00 pm (29)(GMT+01:00) St Ives, Cornwall Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Sarah Snoxall Type of studyLiterature, Travel FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

We have a well-established Salon tradition of spending some time each autumn on the Cornish coast reading Virginia Woolf’s work and enjoying one of the places she loved and in which she spent significant parts of her childhood. This year we are again offering two Woolf studies in St Ives: To the Lighthouse from 26 to 29 September and The Waves from 2 to 5 October 2026.

In this, our seventh travel study devoted to reading To the Lighthouse in the magical environment that inspired it, the experience will be made even more special by the book’s impending centenary. First published on 5 May 1927, this extraordinary work rewards reading and re-reading, revealing new facets of Woolf’s world with every encounter. Toby Brothers, founder of the London Literary Salon and co-facilitator of the study, reveals that even after more than twenty readings she still learns from the book, finding new resonances and greater understanding to share with study participants new and old.

Woolf’s reputation as one of the key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, means that many see her primarily as a London writer, yet the Cornish coastal town of St Ives – where she spent many childhood summers – serves as a prism through which we can explore her perspectives on landscape, domesticity and identity, and their relevance to her time and our own.

“This is something I have dreamed of doing since I first read Woolf’s magical book To the Lighthouse – it has haunted me always. The opportunity to study this work with a keen group of minds in the place that is so crucial to the writing is simply delicious.“

Toby Brothers

During our visit you will have opportunities to visit the iconic Tate St Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Sculpture Garden. If weather allows, there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse and we also hope to look at Talland House, Woolf’s childhood summer home (now privately owned). Until Virginia’s mother, Julia Stephen, died in 1895, the elegant house overlooking St Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home for several months of each year. Although the complete family never returned to St Ives after their mother’s death, her children travelled back in 1905 following the death of their father in the previous year.

“If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind . . . If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.

“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”

Virginia Woolf, “Sketch of the Past”, begun in June 1939

“What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Feedback from participants in previous St Ives studies:

“The studio where the discussion took place is a beautiful, extraordinary place, the participants were imbued with the light and landscape, creating a friendly and committed atmosphere. The two facilitators were wonderful . . .”

“The collaboration between participants and facilitators was rich indeed, and I wonder how it was accomplished that everyone in the group was so insightful and intelligent and I might even say soul-searching . . . I also think it was just a superb group of people.”

Read Salonista Leah Jewett’s account of a Salon Study in St Ives here.

SALON DETAILS:

The cost of the study is £600. Please use the form below to secure your place with an initial registration deposit of £60.00. Once you have registered we will then send you details for payment of the balance owing (£540.00) to complete your booking by bank transfer.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall

Our meetings will take place in the fabulous Porthmeor Studios

26 to 29 September 2026 (this will enable approximately 14 hours of study)

Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Hermione Lee, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780241371954

The cost of £600 covers facilitation, notes and critical resources (N.B. travel, food and accommodation are NOT included and participants are responsible for arranging their own travel, accommodation and insurance).

We recommend booking your accommodation at the earliest opportunity. Places where previous participants have enjoyed staying include No 4 St Ives, 3 Porthminster Terrace, Blue Sky, The Olive Branch, Rivendell and the Harbour View Hotel, there may also be options with Airbnb. PLEASE check web details and compare review sites before you book to make sure your needs will be met.

More on the study:

As one of the primary modernist works, To the Lighthouse demonstrates Woolf at play with language; testing the ability of language to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. One of the characteristics of modernist writing is a shifting centre of narrative perspective, reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority at a time experiencing the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from the Victorian to the Modernist era, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in her work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian age while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Her model, Mrs. Ramsey, (queen-like) holds her daughters to the awe of the noble men that surround her and allows them to “sport with infidel ideas…of a life different…in Paris perhaps; …for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry…though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts…” (To the Lighthouse, pages 10-11).

This quote also demonstrates the Modernist reworking of absolute truth…it is not a question of either this (a male-dominated world) or that (a world of female emancipation): the apparently rigid gender roles borrow from each other — “manliness in their girlish hearts”, “Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection…” — there is another imperialism here, an intimate imperialism of female over male. The truth in this work is not rigid (although Mr. R would like it to be) but can be permeated, blended — seen from another view.

Re-reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf (a review of which is quoted below) has me turning over the search one makes for lost childhood, often for a place that might hold a time but, of course, never does. For Woolf, that search included a grappling with the impact and idealisation of the parent figures — especially the lost mother, whose influence and contradictions continue to wrap around the child inside. Virginia Woolf and a few of her siblings returned to the house in St Ives (that we are lucky enough to visit) years after her mother’s death and the sale of the house. They were like ghosts, sneaking around the gardens, peering in the windows: as though searching for their lost selves and a past that can never be recaptured. That visit — and the need to lay to rest her grief-enwrapped memories of her mother — was the catalyst for To the Lighthouse.

For those who want to go further, here is an excerpt from a review of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf:

“Ms. Lee documents the evolving perception of her subject from ”the delicate lady authoress of a few experimental novels and sketches, some essays and a ‘writer’s’ diary, to one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language.” She does this without recourse to the politicised agendas of the academy or special pleading (all of Woolf’s flaws are on display here); this account sets itself above the fray, the better to home in on the glittery and elusive creature at its centre — the prize catch in what one critic has described as the Bloomsbury pond. From its very first page, Ms. Lee’s book is informed by current thinking on how to approach the writing of someone’s life: “There is no such thing as an objective biography, particularly not in this case. Positions have been taken, myths have been made.” But it is also infused with a very personal passion for her subject, which enables the author to cut crisply through the labyrinth of theories that have sprung up…”

– Daphne Merkin, This Loose, Drifting Material of Life

Although To the Lighthouse is not autobiographical, many critics and readers have found close parallels between Woolf’s early life and the world presented in the book. As we go into the read, it may help you to have a sense of Virginia Woolf and her precarious position as a visionary on the edge of a violently changing world. I will have more biographical notes for you when we start.

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Sarah Snoxall

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Time

26 September 2026 5:00 pm - 29 September 2026 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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St Ives, Cornwall

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Booking deposit £60 to be paid on registration, the balance of £540 will be payable by end of July 2026.

All places are booked

Absalom, Absalom! - William FaulknerSEVEN MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM - THE SECOND IN OUR 'FAULKNER AND HIS CHILDREN' SERIES, 28 SEPTEMBER - 9 NOVEMBER2026mon28sep5:00 pm7:30 pm5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJOHN ALLEMAND & DEBORAH LAWUNMI

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Absalom, Absalom! is arguably Faulkner’s most difficult, but also his most brilliant work. Eminent Faulkner critic and historian Fred Hobson (2003), like many others, claims that it is Faulkner’s masterwork, “not only because of the richness of its story . . . its tragic dimension, its prose, and its narrative complexity (The Sound and the Fury shares these, after all) but also because of its keen historical sense. Absalom is the Faulkner novel that deals . . . most centrally with what C. Vann Woodward calls ‘the burden of southern history’—that is, the racial burden—and it is a work that paints in many particulars, a realistic picture of antebellum life in the Deep South and explores the origins and the meaning of ‘aristocracy’ in that region. In no other Faulkner novel, perhaps no American novel, are all elements of that critical triumvirate, race, class, and gender, explored so compellingly”.

Absalom, Absalom tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, a brooding and enigmatic stranger who comes to fictional Jefferson in the early 1830’s with a wagon load of enslaved Haitians and a French architect from New Orleans to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness, to sculpt it into an aristocratic bastion of power and to engender a dynasty through the force of his sheer will. Faulkner says that Sutpen was a man “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him”—true–but Sutpen is both the progenitor and the author of his own downfall through a curious combination of sheer innocence, blind pride, and moral bankruptcy.

Coming back to Absalom, Absalom! after many years feels like returning to a haunted house you once loved. The place is still there, echoing with monstrous voices, still as impressive and unlivable as ever! While Absalom, Absalom is one of Faulkner’s most Gothic novels, Faulkner’s gift is to wed that genre’s ghostly, claustrophobic intensity to modernist formal experimentation, his technical innovations (shifting perspectives, fragmented chronology, intricate, lyrical prose, etc.) adding to the oppressive emotional weight of an intergenerational past which suffuses the present.

Deborah Robbins (1981) explains that for the characters in Absalom, Absalom, telling is a matter of life and death: “[T]he narrators speak with the desperate eloquence of people who fear the interruption of a story they must tell, a story of great personal significance. Each shapes the Sutpen material to a pattern reflecting the teller’s own idiosyncratic vision, hoping to win confirmation of the identity defined by that ordering of experience. But while Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Shreve and Quentin all seek witnesses to their self-creation in the stories they tell, all resist the self-effacing passivity of listening. To assume the role of teller is to make a claim to identity, while to surrender that claim is a small death. Thus, the right to tell is repeatedly challenged and usurped in the novel as the narrators compete for the instrument of self assertion”.

So where does that leave us—the readers? Do we surrender to the tale or do we compete (or collaborate?) with its narrators in a search for meaning: Duncan Aswell (1968) claims that Faulkner’s “daring and brilliant strategy in Absalom, Absalom! is to divide us against ourselves, our emotional against our intellectual responses, by providing us with continually more irresistible and subtle rhetorical arguments until we forget what we have been asked to take on faith and what we can safely accept as known and proven. Faulkner plays upon precisely those needs and desires in us that he shows operating in his characters, and demonstrates the truth of his fable by making us equally blind and hopeful participants in the search for illumination”.

Please join us as we compete and collaborate with some of literature’s most famous narrators in unraveling the mysteries of this spellbinding classic!

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-week study led by John Allemand and Deborah Lawunmi live on Zoom

Mondays, 28 September – 9 November 2026, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)

£350 for seven meeting study with two facilitators (17.5 hours)

Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, Norton Critical Edition (2023), edited by Susan Scott Parrish, ISBN-10: 0393422585, ISBN-13: 978-0393422580.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

JOHN ALLEMAND & DEBORAH LAWUNMI

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Time

28 September 2026 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

5October 5:00 pm12October 5:00 pm19October 5:00 pm26October 5:00 pm2November 5:00 pm9November 5:00 pm

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October 2026

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – four day study in St Ives 2026FOUR DAY TRAVEL STUDY, 1-4 OCTOBER 20262026thu01oct5:00 pmsun04(oct 4)12:00 pm5:00 pm - 12:00 pm (4)(GMT+01:00) St Ives, Cornwall Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Sarah Snoxall Type of studyLiterature, Travel FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

We have a well-established Salon tradition of spending some time each autumn on the Cornish coast reading Virginia Woolf’s work and enjoying one of the places she loved and in which she spent significant parts of her childhood. This year we are again offering two Woolf studies in St Ives: To the Lighthouse from 26 to 29 September (when we will also celebrate the approaching centenary of the first publication of the book in May 1927) and The Waves from 1 to 4 October 2026.

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Reading Virginia Woolf requires a release of the faculty we have so carefully trained to be grounded in time and fact. Her fluid and probing prose allows such a deep and troubling glimpse into the human heart that one comes away wiser and broader than before. This is not my first floating into The Waves, what I have already experienced makes me want to swim far out into her embracing world of character and reflection.

We invite you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely place and share the work with a group of other keen minds.

I love this review of The Waves from Goodreads:

‘My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There’s not a wasted word here: Woolf’s attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven’s nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.

‘The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.’

Feedback from participants in previous St Ives studies:

Read Salonista Leah Jewett’s account of a Salon Study in St Ives here.

JOINING DETAILS:

The cost of the study is £600. Please use the form below to secure your place with an initial registration deposit of £60.00. Once you have registered we will then send you details for payment of the balance owing (£540.00) to complete your booking by bank transfer.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall

Our meetings will take place in the fabulous Porthmeor Studios

1 to 4 October 2026 (this will enable approximately 14 hours of study)

Recommended editions: The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Vintage Classics, ISBN-13: ‎
978-1784870843 or Penguin Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0241372081

The cost of £600 covers facilitation, notes and critical resources (N.B. travel, food and accommodation are NOT included and participants are responsible for arranging their own travel, accommodation and insurance).

We recommend booking your accommodation at the earliest opportunity. Places where previous participants have enjoyed staying include No 4 St Ives, 3 Porthminster Terrace, Blue Sky, The Olive Branch, Rivendell and the Harbour View Hotel, there may also be options with Airbnb. PLEASE check web details and compare review sites before you book to make sure your needs will be met.

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Sarah Snoxall

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Time

1 October 2026 5:00 pm - 4 October 2026 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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St Ives, Cornwall

Book this Salon

Booking deposit £60 to be paid on registration, the balance of £540 will be payable by end of July 2026.

All places are booked

Event Details

*Gustave Doré, Dante’s Purgatorio, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Dante’s epic journey through the afterlife continues in the Purgatorio. Here the poet explores self-transformation: How do we let go of pride, hatred, lust, jealousy and greed? How can we move from cruelty and to kindness, from sin to salvation?

Dante writes in the first person as a very human voyager, reacting with strong and varied emotions to the characters before him, just as the reader might. As we pass through an array of landscapes, each appropriate to the sins and purgations there, Dante undergoes a kind of transformation himself. And he challenges us to do the same.

You don’t need to have read Dante’s Inferno to join this study. Dante, like Joyce, is an ideal author for in-depth study at the LitSalon. The Divine Comedy has multiple meanings that provide rich material for discussion, weaving together myth, theology, history and the contemporary life of Dante’s time. We will explore Dante’s relationship with Virgil and Beatrice, and with several other vivid personalities he meets along his way.

According to T.S. Eliot, “The whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it.” Join us in reading one of the classics of world literature. You will be welcome to use whichever translation of Dante you prefer, but Sean will be using the translation by D.M. Black, whose notes and commentary are especially focused on the Purgatorio’s implications for psychological self-transformation.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eleven meeting study (on Zoom) led by Sean Forester

Thursdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time)

1, 8, 15, 22, 29 October; 5, 12, 19 November; 3, 10, 17 December 2026 (N.B. no meeting on 26 November, Thanksgiving)

£440 for eleven two-hour meetings, to include opening notes and resources

Recommended edition: Dante’s Purgatorio, translated by Jean Hollander & Robert Hollander, ISBN: 978-0385497008

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

1 October 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

8October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm15October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm22October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm29October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm5November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm12November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm19November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm3December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm10December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm17December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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'Loosening the ligaments': A LitSalon community of writers - Block 4SIX FACILITATED ONLINE MEETINGS TO SUPPORT CREATIVE WRITING PRACTICE, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 20262026tue06oct5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByAlison Cable Type of studyCreative Writing

Event Details

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

How it works

Anchor Session (first Tuesday of each month, 5.00-7.00 pm, UK time):
A guided workshop exploring a theme, text, or prompt through discussion, short exercises and optional sharing. These sessions provide inspiration and direction for your writing practice.

Open Writing Session (third Tuesday of each month, 5:00–6:30 pm, UK time):
A lightly held, communal writing space in which you can develop your ideas, try new forms, or simply write in the company of others. Optional check-in and sharing at the end.

Block Pass: £105 for three months (includes three Anchor Sessions and three companion Open Writing Sessions). This block encourages continuity and engagement, with sessions scheduled monthly to help you build a routine.

Single Sessions: please enquire.

Block 1: January – March 2026

Anchor: 6 January | 3 February | 3 March

Open: 20 January | 17 February | 17 March

Block 2: April – June 2026

Anchor: 7 April | 5 May | 2 June

Open: 28 April | 19 May | 23 June

Block 3: July – September 2026

Anchor: 7 July | 4 August | 1 September

Open: 21 July | 18 August | 15 September

Block 4: October – December 2026

Anchor: 6 October | 3 November | 1 December

Open: 20 October | 17 November | 15 December

Organizer

Alison Cable

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Time

6 October 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

20October 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm3November 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm17November 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm1December 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm15December 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

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THE GUERMANTES WAY (early)The third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, 13 WEEK STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM (early)2026wed07oct3:00 pm5:00 pm3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+01:00) VIRTUAL Event Organized ByToby Brothers Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“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

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the mountains of Modernism. This is my eighth tour through the Search and each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments. This third 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 – you will be surprised. The groups who have made it through the first two volumes in the last six months are lively and welcoming and we have room for two or three more to join us. If you have not read the first two 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.”

While another observes: “I feel really privileged to be gaining a better understanding of Proust’s amazing work and be able to enjoy the intricacies of his language and thoughts . . . the meetings allow plenty of time and space for exploration and our study is reinforced by emails and relevant essays in between meetings. I am very grateful to have this opportunity to join the study.”

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 with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

JOINING DETAILS:

It may be possible for new members to join this group of readers. If you are interested please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject heading: ‘Joining Proust Group’.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers

Wednesdays, 3.00-5.00 pm (UK time)

Thirteen meeting study: 7 October – 9 December 2026, resuming from 13 January – 3 February 2027, N.B. these dates cover 14 weeks allowing one ‘spare’ week for use in case of illness.

Recommended edition: Vintage Classics (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright) ISBN-13: 978-0099362418

£455 for thirteen meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

Salon Director...

Salon Director

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Time

7 October 2026 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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VIRTUAL

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

14October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm21October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm28October 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm4November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm11November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm18November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm25November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm2December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm9December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm13January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm20January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm27January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm3February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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THE GUERMANTES WAY (Later)The third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, 13 WEEK STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM (Later)2026wed07oct5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) VIRTUAL Event Organized ByToby Brothers Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“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

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

JOINING DETAILS:

It may be possible for new members to join this group of readers. If you are interested please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject heading: ‘Joining Proust Group’.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers

Wednesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time)

Thirteen meeting study: 7 October – 9 December 2026, resuming from 13 January – 3 February 2027, N.B. these dates cover 14 weeks allowing one ‘spare’ week for use in case of illness.

Recommended edition: Vintage Classics (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright) ISBN-13: 978-0099362418

£455 for thirteen meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

Salon Director...

Salon Director

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Time

7 October 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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VIRTUAL

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Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - Oscar WildeSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 8 OCTOBER, 5.00-6.30 PM (UK TIME)2026thu08oct5:00 pm6:30 pm5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon Short FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

*Portrait of Oscar Wilde, Napoleon Sarony, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining the full study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, starting on Thursday, 12 November, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1891), one of Wilde’s most deliciously cynical short stories. A society fortune-teller reads Lord Arthur’s palm at a London dinner party and discovers something so alarming that Lord Arthur resolves to act on it immediately — before he can be held responsible for the consequences. What follows is a comedy of manners so dark it is practically a thriller, and a satire of upper-class Victorian morality that barely needs to exaggerate its source material.

Or does it? Wilde’s central joke — that a man of honour must commit a crime in order to fulfil his social obligations — is both absurd and completely logical. The story asks, deadpan, what it means to do the right thing, and arrives at an answer that should perhaps trouble us more than it does.

This Short is also a way in to our upcoming study of The Picture of Dorian Gray — a novel Wilde’s fin de siècle critics denounced as unclean and dangerous, even though Stoddart had already gone through the original manuscript, pencil in hand, crossing out some 500 words to make it acceptable. One hundred and thirty-six years on, Wilde’s central question feels less like Victorian Gothic and more like Monday morning: what are we willing to sacrifice — integrity, authenticity, other people — to keep the image intact? Wilde knew, long before Instagram did, that the real corruption isn’t the sins you commit; it’s the lengths you’ll go to make sure nobody sees them.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short on Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (which can be downloaded from links in this post) led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

Thursday 8 October, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK), live on Zoom

‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.

Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

8 October 2026 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

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Madame Bovary by Gustave FlaubertEIGHT MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 20 OCTOBER - 8 DECEMBER 20262026tue20oct6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00) VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByRalph Kleinman Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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“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.

Madame Bovary appeared at number 10 in the Guardian’s 2026 ‘Best 100 Novels of All Time’ with good reason. Although it 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?

N.B. A study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is planned for early in 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study led by Ralph Kleinman

Tuesdays, 6.00-8.00 pm UK time

We are also offering a second later study, primarily for US participants, from 12.00 midnight-2.00 am UK time (7.00-9.00 pm Eastern Daylight Time/Eastern Standard Time)

20 October to 8 December 2026

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)

£280 for eight meetings, to include opening notes and resources

Organizer

Ralph Kleinman

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Time

20 October 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

27October 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm3November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm10November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm17November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm24November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm1December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm8December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (later study)EIGHT-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 20 OCTOBER - 8 DECEMBER 20262026tue20oct(oct 20)11:59 pmwed21(oct 21)2:00 am11:59 pm - 2:00 am (21)(GMT+01:00) VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByRalph Kleinman Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

“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

N.B. A study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is planned for early in 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study live on Zoom led by Ralph Kleinman

Tuesdays, 12.00 midnight-2.00 am the following day UK time (7.00-9.00 pm Eastern Daylight Time/Eastern Standard Time)

We are also offering an earlier study, from 6.00-8.00 pm UK time

20 October to 8 December 2026

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)

£280 for eight meetings, to include opening notes and resources

Organizer

Ralph Kleinman

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Time

20 October 2026 11:59 pm - 21 October 2026 2:00 am(GMT+01:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

27October 11:59 pm28October 2:00 am3November 11:59 pm4November 2:00 am10November 11:59 pm11November 2:00 am17November 11:59 pm18November 2:00 am24November 11:59 pm25November 2:00 am1December 11:59 pm2December 2:00 am8December 11:59 pm9December 2:00 am

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The Age of Innocence - Edith WhartonSIX MEETING STUDY, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 21 OCTOBER - 25 NOVEMBER, 6.30-8.30PM (UK TIME)2026wed21oct6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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Published in 1920 — the same year American women won the right to vote — The Age of Innocence is set in a world Edith Wharton knew from the inside: Old New York society, a closed world of inherited money and rigid ritual revolving around the unspoken rule that nothing shall ever, under any circumstances, be said plainly. What cannot be acknowledged cannot threaten. What cannot be named cannot exist.

Into this airless world arrives Countess Ellen Olenska, who has had the bad taste to flee an abusive marriage and the worse taste to expect her family’s support. She is sophisticated, unconventional, and faintly European. In short, dangerous. Newland Archer is engaged to the exquisitely correct May Welland. He should not be thinking about Ellen Olenska at all. What follows is a love story in which almost nothing happens and everything is at stake.

The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive it. The jury had voted for Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, only to be overruled by Columbia University’s conservative trustees, who found Lewis’s satire insufficiently “wholesome” — and awarded the prize to a novel whose entire project is the dissection of the world that word protects. Wharton, on learning the prize was meant for Lewis, wrote to him: “When I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair.”

In a cultural moment defined by the performance of virtue and the management of image — by the gap between the life curated for public consumption and the life actually lived — Wharton’s diagnosis of how societies enforce conformity, and what it costs the people who comply, has never felt more precise. She knew that the real cost of a society built on appearances isn’t borne by the people who break the rules. It’s borne by the people who keep them.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

Six-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

21 October – 25 November 2026

Wednesdays, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time)

£240 for six two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: The Age of Innocence, Penguin Classics, 1996. ISBN: 9780140189704

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

21 October 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

28October 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm4November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm11November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm18November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm25November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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Grief(s): Collective, Private and Ecological MourningSINGLE MEETING LED BY JULIE SUTHERLAND LIVE ON ZOOM, THURSDAY 22 OCTOBER 5.00-7.30 PM (UK TIME)2026thu22oct5:00 pm7:30 pm5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyPoetry FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

*The Pain Comforted by Faith by Giovanni Segantini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

Warsan Shire, from What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

To live is to love, in all its many forms. Myriad entities become the subjects of our love: human and non-human animals, the land and water and sky. Because we love, we must suffer its corollary—loss. But how do we process the many losses we face, personal and collective, over a lifetime? Experts say that in the West our mourning rituals have diminished, even while we are confronted with increasing reasons to feel grief. Today, the world feels deeply damaged. Everywhere, it and we are hurting. In the last decade alone, we have been confronted with calamitous political violences, climate disasters, a global pandemic, and the breakdown of human rights. In these unsettling times, every flash of breaking news is enough to crack the human heart. And while we bear these, we continue to sustain personal devastation.

Can poetry help us process our grief? Can it be part of a grieving practice to help us make sense of our feelings? Can it invite us into a community of mourners who find strength in each other’s stories? In this workshop, we will examine three poems exploring different kinds of grief: collective, private and ecological. Join Julie Sutherland in a study of poems by Heid E. Erdrich (Public Grief), Jackie Kay (Darling), and Pamela Mordecai (My Sister Cries the Sea). We will close the session with a reading of Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods.

Please note: This workshop is rooted in the belief that poetry has the power to heal emotional wounds, shift public attitudes towards divisive topics and improve social connectedness during times of global distress. To allow participants extra time to experience the poetry contemplatively as well as intellectually, the single session runs for 2.5 hours.

Poems and resources will be sent to participants in advance of the session.

Communal Grief: Heid E. Erdrich – Public Grief

Private Grief: Jackie Kay – Darling

Ecological Grief (Eco-Grief): Pamela Mordecai – My Sister Cries the Sea

Conclusion – Practising the Bittersweet Art of Letting Go: Mary Oliver – In Blackwater Woods

JOINING DETAILS:

Single 2.5 hour meeting live on Zoom, led by Julie Sutherland

Thursday, 22 October, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)

£50 for single meeting, to include notes and resources

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

22 October 2026 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+01:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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Why read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? - a LitSalon ShortSINGLE MEETING LITSALON SHORT, LIVE ON ZOOM, 28 OCTOBER 2026, 6.00-7.15 PM (UK TIME)2026wed28oct6:00 pm7:15 pm6:00 pm - 7:15 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon Short, Poetry FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

*The wife of the Green Knight secretly visits Sir Gawain in his bedchamber, British Library, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons*

“But where will you be? Where’s your abode?
You’re a man of mystery, as God is my maker.”

from Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Believed to date from around 1400 and regarded as one of finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry, we know little about who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight other than that they were from the North of England.

Set at Christmas in Camelot, the court of King Arthur, it is a mythic tale of magic and mystery in the age of chivalry that has attracted countless translators to explore its rich literary artistry and subtle psychological depth.

In this LitSalon Short we will consider the enduring appeal of this otherworldly wintry adventure and the translation by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, which will be the subject of a four-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst in the weeks before Christmas.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single meeting LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Wednesday 28 October, 6.00-7.15 pm (UK time)

LitSalon Shorts are offered free-of-charge, but please use the form below to reserve your place

Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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28 October 2026 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Art That Breaks UsLECTURE BY DR JULIE SUTHERLAND, FOLLOWED BY DISCUSSION MODERATED BY TOBY BROTHERS, LIVE ON ZOOM2026thu29oct5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland Type of studyArt & literature FrequencyOne-off Event

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‘I fell upon Shakespeare suddenly, and I was struck as though by lighting’. So wrote the nineteenth-century French composer Hector Berlioz in his Mémoires, reflecting on his first encounter with Hamlet, followed days later by Romeo and Juliet.

What he describes is not mere admiration but devastation: art experienced as shock, grief, and prolonged emotional disorientation. This is the opening lecture in the Case for Unhappiness: Arts Against the Tyranny of Positivity, a series that explores the paradox of tragedy—the pleasure found in the representation of suffering—and the enduring human attraction to stories that unsettle and wound us. From Ancient Greek drama to modern literature, music and visual art, artists have repeatedly turned to pain as a source of beauty, truth and insight.

Grounded in aesthetic theory, literary studies, and philosophy, this lively and accessible lecture is designed for curious minds, no prior knowledge is required.

Works which will be referenced include: Antigone (Sophocles), King Lear (Shakespeare), The Awakening (Kate Chopin), Betroffenheit (Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, which can be viewed at Marquee TV),

JOINING DETAILS:

Single lecture (with further events to follow at dates to be confirmed) by Dr Julie Sutherland, live on Zoom, followed by live audience discussion moderated by Toby Brothers.

Thursday 29 October, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)

£25.00 for 1.5 hour lecture with early booking discount price of £20.00 available until 1 October using the code BREAK20) at checkout.

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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29 October 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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November 2026

Poet tasting #1: TennysonTWO-MEETING STUDY, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM, TUESDAY 3 & 10 NOVEMBER, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026tue03nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst Type of studyPoetry

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*Alfred Lord Tennyson by Samuel Laurence, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

”Dark house, by which once more I stand

                           Here in the long unlovely street,

                           Doors, where my heart was used to beat

                  So quickly, waiting for a hand…”

We hope that this Salon on Tennyson will be the first of many, where Tim Swinglehurst invites salonistas to a tasting of a specific poet writing sometime between the English Renaissance and the outbreak of the First World War. His aim is that after two weeks you will be left wanting more!

In 1946 W.H. Auden articulated the polarised reception – Victorian idolisation versus Modernist rejection – of his venerable poetical predecessor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, writing “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did”. Tennyson’s mastery of form and exceptional ear for rhythm and lyrical phrasing (“the finest ear of any English poet since Milton” said T.S. Eliot) were praised; his preference for hypnotic, sensual musicality at the expense of intellectual rigour and moral seriousness condemned (according to F.R. Leavis he was guilty of an unhealthy, “dream world” escapism, while Eliot – again – described “a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought”).

More generously, Professor Christopher Ricks has written, “That, among so much else, he knew – and could effect – consolation as no one else has in our tongue, knowing consolation in its substantiality as well as its limits; that he understood madness, bereavement, fear, shivering, erotic loveliness, undying friendship, loss, exquisite courtesy, as it has been given to very few to understand them.” Extraordinary that anyone should have such comprehensive understanding of melancholia as Auden claims for Tennyson, mind-boggling that his understanding may encompass so much more.

During this two-week Salon we will read short poems and selected passages from longer poems to taste Tennyson for ourselves and see how we respond to his verse. We will, among other poems, read from The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, listening to Tennyson in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey; explore a fraction of Tennyson’s grief and the mind-altering challenges of geology and cosmology to his faith expressed in In Memoriam; and journey into the deeply disturbed and deteriorating psyche of the narrator of the monodrama Maud. We will, most importantly, take time to read some of Tennyson’s verse aloud together, experiencing with our ears and voices the Tennyson ‘sound’.

“Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.”

JOINING DETAILS:

Two-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Tuesday 3 & 10 November, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£80 for two meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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3 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Russian Short StoriesFOUR MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY ALISON CABLE, 5 - 26 NOVEMBER 20262026thu05nov3:00 pm5:00 pm3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByAlison Cable Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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A close, contemplative reading of seven classic Russian short stories, guided by George Saunders’ provocative description of them in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain as “seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art — namely, to ask the big questions.”

What happens when we read these stories with that purpose in mind? We’ll consider questions of truth and love, how to live and how to make meaning within the solitary confinement of our mortality. Together, we’ll linger over the strange, precise worlds these writers have made—and see what their stories might still ask of us.

In this study, we will use the book as a background to our own reading, focusing on the stories themselves—by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol—while also drawing on Saunders’ insights as a backdrop to our discussions. Rather than analysing his commentary in detail, we will engage directly with these literary masterpieces, exploring their themes, techniques and enduring relevance.

JOINING DETAILS:

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, ISBN 978-1526624246 is a required text for this study

Four-week study on Zoom led by Alison Cable

Thursdays, 3.00-5.00 pm (UK time)

5, 12, 19, 26 November 2026

£140 to include introductory notes and resources

Organizer

Alison Cable

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5 November 2026 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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12November 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm19November 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm26November 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

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Bartleby, the Scrivener - A LitSalon ShortSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 NOVEMBER, 5.00-6.30 PM (UK TIME)2026thu12nov5:00 pm6:30 pm5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon Short FrequencyOne-off Event

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Thomas_Patch_-_A_Young_Man_Seated_at_a_Desk_Writing_a_Letter_-_B1977.14.309(6)_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art

Drawing by Thomas Patch, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the ten-meeting study of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, starting 14 January 2027, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), one of the strangest and most haunting stories in American literature. Published in the same year as Bleak House, it echoes many of the themes in Charles Dickens’ novel.

A law office. A copyist who responds to every request with “I would prefer not to.” A system that cannot process a human being who simply stops complying.

Or can it? Melville’s central joke — that a man who does nothing is more destabilising than a man who does harm — is both absurd and completely logical. The story asks, with a perfectly straight face, what happens when a human being falls through the cracks of every institutional net designed to catch him.

As for Bleak House. Dickens’ masterpiece has at its centre Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in Chancery that has consumed fortunes, ruined lives, and become its own self-perpetuating institution — a monument to procedural delay so vast and so perfectly constructed that it requires no villain to sustain it. The thematic overlap with Bartleby is exact: the way bureaucratic logic defeats human agency without anyone being visibly responsible. Dickens knew that the cruellest thing a corrupt system can do is not to break its own rules. It’s to follow them perfectly.

Our ten-meeting study of Bleak House begins on Thursday 14 January 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story is available free online via the linked text above.

Thursday 12 November, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK time), live on Zoom

‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.

Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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12 November 2026 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar WildeFOUR MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN, 12 NOVEMBER - 3 DECEMBER 20262026thu12nov6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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“. . . Unclean . . . spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents — a poisonous book . . . ”

Anonymous review, London Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890

“Dull and nasty . . . stupid and vulgar . . . immoral. It may be suggested that Wilde derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting.”

Samuel Henry Jeyes, The St. James Gazette, 24 June 1890

“The poor public, hearing from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas, they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. ”

Oscar Wilde, from his response to the St. James Gazette review, 25 June 1890

Joseph Marshall Stoddart, Oscar Wilde’s editor in the Philadelphia offices of Lippincott’s Magazine, was neither a bumpkin nor a prude: in 1882 he arranged for Wilde to visit Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, during his American visit. But, alarmed by material he feared readers would find “offensive”, and unbeknownst to its author until after publication, Stoddart went through Wilde’s original manuscript, pencil in hand, crossing out some 500 words to render it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”

In short, the novel that Wilde’s irate fin de siècle reviewers deemed filth was already a bowdlerised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The contemporary reader, fresh from watching the latest episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, may struggle to understand the fury that The Picture of Dorian Gray unleashed in the 1890s. Or the stench it carried for decades after, having starred as Exhibit A in Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency”.

One hundred and thirty-six years on, The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks to our moment with uncanny precision.

Dorian Gray’s portrait — polished, static, forever young while its subject rots — anticipates the curated profile picture, the Zoom filter, the gap between the life performed online and the life actually lived. In an era of Botox and doom scrolling, instant gratification and weekly scandal, Wilde’s central question feels less like Victorian Gothic and more like Monday morning: what are we willing to sacrifice — integrity, authenticity, other people — to keep the image intact?

Wilde knew, long before Instagram did, that the real corruption isn’t the sins you commit; it’s the lengths you’ll go to make sure nobody sees them.

This study will use, as its basic text, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, published by the Harvard University Press (2012).

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 (UK time), 12 November – 3 December

HIGHLY recommended edition: The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray: A Reader’s Edition ISBN: 9780674066311

£160.00 for four two-hour meetings

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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12 November 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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19November 6:30 pm26November 6:30 pm3December 6:30 pm

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Sir Gawain and the Green KnightFOUR MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, 25 NOVEMBER - 16 DECEMBER 2026, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026wed25nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst Type of studyLiterature, Poetry FrequencyWeekly

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*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“This kyng lay at Camylot upon Cristmasse,
With rich revel aright and rechlesse mirthes.”

It was Christmas at Camelot and the long fifteen-day celebrations of feasting, dancing and playing games were in full swing at the court of King Arthur when suddenly, at new year, a mysterious knight (“overal enker grene” – entirely vivid green) appears. The stranger issues a challenge to the king’s knights: he will withstand any blow from any knight, provided that in a year and a day’s time the Green Knight may return the blow. When Sir Gawain takes up this challenge and strikes off the Green Knight’s head, he unleashes a series of events which threaten not only his knighthood and the raison d’être of Arthur’s court but disturb his understanding of himself and the world he inhabits.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a perfect read for the winter season, as Gawain sets off at in November to seek out the Green Knight and receive the return-blow. He travels through snow-bound landscapes, where cold streams come clattering down from cliff-tops and hang high above his head in hard icicles, and un-blithe birds upon bare twigs piteously pipe at the pain of the cold, a cold which the poet counterpoints with the warmth of hospitality and festivity celebrated in the castle where Gawain finds rest over Christmas before his final confrontation with the Green Knight.

On the surface, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appears to be a simple story of magic and adventure, but it is recognised as a great masterpiece of medieval literature, exhibiting keen and subtle psychological depth, and displaying rich and intricate literary artistry. Join us to journey with Gawain as he navigates the cold of winter, the otherness of the Green Knight and his other-worlds, and the complexities of medieval courtly love and fidelity.

The medieval English dialect of the poem is not straightforward. For this study we will be using the acclaimed translation into modern English by poet laureate Simon Armitage, with occasional forays into the original Middle English. The recommended edition is Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007. ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Wednesday 25 November, 2, 9 &16 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£160 for four meetings, to include background materials and resources

Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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25 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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2December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm9December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm16December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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January 2027

ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE (2027 early)21 MEETINGS, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 15 JUNE 2027, 12.00 - 2.00PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan12:00 pm2:00 pm12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00) VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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In the more than 100 years since it was first published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – Ulysses has sometimes been described as ‘unreadable’ and is frequently listed as ‘the book I’m ashamed (or regretful) not to have read’. And yet it came in at number 3 in the Guardian’s recent list of The 100 Best Novels of All Time and at number 10 in the follow-up Readers’ top 100 novels of all time. It is now 20 years since Salon founder Toby Brothers first led a group reading this extraordinary and challenging work, and in 2027 we are again offering the opportunity to join her in guiding a group of committed and curious readers through the pages. Join us if you can, and bear in mind the words of the great American novelist William Faulkner:

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

*Portrait of James Joyce by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1934, National Gallery of Ireland, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.*

“. . . Joyce’s contribution to a new way of writing particularly as it affects narrative theory, the role of the reader, and how stories are told from inside the consciousness of the individual. So both the external world we associate with history and the internal world that rightly belongs to the private world of consciousness are redrawn by Joyce in a manner that is both original and at times dependent on sources outside the novel.”

David Pierce in Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading

Widely acknowledged today as one of the greatest novels of all time, UIysses was immediately controversial on publication, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”. Our study is suitable both for people who have not yet entered the pages of Ulysses and those who have already read it at least once. Our work with this book will widen your perspective and deepen your experience of the power of language.

There are many good reasons for studying this huge and sometimes intimidating text, but you will only know for yourself by diving in. Toby believes the best way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious fellow readers who all contribute to evoking meaning through their questions and insights, she explains:

“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. Thank you 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.

“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 from 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK time) with an alternative option later in the day (5.30 – 7.30 pm)

The study will comprise 21 meetings led by Toby Brothers starting on Tuesday 12 January and finishing on Tuesday 15 June 2027, with four possible Sunday afternoon meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 31 January, 28 February, 14 March and 30 May) and NO meetings on 4 and 11 May.

The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £575

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

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

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12 January 2027 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

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19January 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm26January 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm2February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm9February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm16February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm23February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm2March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm9March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm16March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm23March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm30March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm6April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm13April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm20April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm27April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm18May 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm25May 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm1June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm8June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm15June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm

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The Portrait of a Lady - Henry JamesEIGHT-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 2 MARCH 2027, 5.00-7.00 PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByKeith Fosbrook & Sarah Snoxall Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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According to writer and academic Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, this is the novel in which Henry James first allowed his imagination full stretch. It was certainly his first big success and remains the most popular of all his longer works.

The Portrait of a Lady tells the story of Isabel Archer, a young American woman arriving in Europe with money, independence and a determination to “see life”. She is intelligent, self-confident, perceptive and curious, even though some find her presumptuous and naive! In James’ own words, he is writing about ‘a certain young woman confronting her destiny’.

For most young women in the 1880s that destiny centred on marriage. At the start of the book, it looks as if Isabel is about to accept this by marrying a forceful, prosperous young man in New England, but when this is postponed by an aunt whisking her off to Europe it seems to open up a world of possibilities curiously attractive to Isabel, in much the same way as visiting Europe proved irresistible for Henry James himself.

Henry James seems to identify deeply with the character of Isabel. In his prelude to the book, he quotes George Eliot’s words about young women, ‘In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection’. His admiration for Eliot and his own inclinations clearly combine to lead him to centre his story on a female character, and to raise fundamental questions about what possibilities there are for women to act independently. He probes the influential Emersonian vision of untrammelled self-reliance, inviting us to consider the extent to which a woman can create her own life when convention offers no more than a frame into which she can step, to become an agreeable but mute and unchanging portrait.

In the context of literary history, this novel is often seen as a link between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, a kind of bridge between Victorian fiction and modernism. This applies to both content and form, as the novel focuses on the drama of the interior life and, according to Michael Gorra, offers ‘the most searching account of the moment-by-moment flow of consciousness that any novelist had yet attempted’.

For all the possibilities of intellectual engagement with the book, we should never forget the power it has to make us believe in, care for and be deeply moved by the troubled life of the central character. Isabel hopes for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but Henry James’ novels always warn us of the difficulty of achieving these goals in the face of the powerful influence on human affairs of money and deceit. There are elements of the fairy tale in this novel, but don’t expect it to have a happy ending.

JOINING DETAILS:

8 meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Keith Fosbrook and Sarah Snoxall

Tuesdays, 12 January – 2 March 2027, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, edited by Michael Gorra, Norton Critical Edition, ISBN: 978-0393938531

£320 for eight two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Keith Fosbrook & Sarah Snoxall

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12 January 2027 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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19January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm26January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm2February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm9February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm16February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm23February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm2March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE (2027 late)21 MEETINGS, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 15 JUNE 2027, 5.30 - 7.30PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

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

“. . . Joyce’s contribution to a new way of writing particularly as it affects narrative theory, the role of the reader, and how stories are told from inside the consciousness of the individual. So both the external world we associate with history and the internal world that rightly belongs to the private world of consciousness are redrawn by Joyce in a manner that is both original and at times dependent on sources outside the novel.”

David Pierce in Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading

“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. Thank you 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.

“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 from 5.30 – 7.30 pm (UK time) with an alternative option earlier in the day (12.00-2.00 pm UK)

The study will comprise 21 meetings led by Toby Brothers starting on Tuesday 12 January and finishing on Tuesday 15 June 2027, with four possible Sunday afternoon meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 31 January, 28 February, 14 March and 30 May) and NO meetings on 4 and 11 May.

The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £575

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

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

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Salon Director

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Time

12 January 2027 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm26January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm2February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm9February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm16February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm23February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm2March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm9March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm16March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm23March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm30March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm6April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm13April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm20April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm27April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm18May 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm25May 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm1June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm8June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm15June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Bleak House - Charles DickensTEN MEETINGS, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 14 JANUARY - 18 MARCH 2027, 6.30-8.30PM (UK TIME)2027thu14jan6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein Type of studyLiterature FrequencyWeekly

Event Details

With Bleak House, Charles Dickens sharpened his satire to its finest point and never looked back. First published in monthly parts between 1852 and 1853, it is Gothic in atmosphere, labyrinthine in structure, and merciless in its central argument: that institutions designed to dispense justice can, given sufficient time and indifference, become engines of pure destruction.

At the heart of the novel sits Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in Chancery — the English court of equity — that has been grinding through the system for so long that no living person can remember what it was originally about. It concerns an inheritance. Or several inheritances. Or possibly none at all. By the time we encounter it, the case has consumed fortunes, ruined lives, and become its own self-perpetuating institution: a monument to procedural delay so vast and so perfectly constructed that it requires no villain to sustain it. The system does that work entirely on its own.

Around this vortex, Dickens assembles one of the largest casts in English fiction. There is Esther Summerson, our narrator for half the novel — orphaned, self-effacing, unreliable in ways she cannot see, and, it is hard not to notice, rather more interested in Ada Clare than in any of the men who pursue her. There is Lady Dedlock, magnificent and glacial, with a secret that will undo her. There is Tulkinghorn, the family solicitor, a man who collects other people’s secrets the way other men collect art. There is Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English literature, pursuing a truth that will satisfy no one. And there is Jo, the crossing-sweeper: a child who cannot read, does not know where he was born, and is moved on by every authority he encounters until there is nowhere left to move him.

The fog that opens the novel is Chancery made weather. Dickens’ critics considered the novel’s famous use of spontaneous combustion preposterous. He considered it a defensible metaphor. Both were right.

At a moment when courts are being asked to hold the line against executive power — and when the question of whether they can is genuinely open — Dickens’ portrait of a legal system that defeats justice through its own internal logic has never felt more urgent. Bleak House understands, with absolute clarity, how a system staffed by reasonable individuals and governed by elaborate rules can produce outcomes that are neither reasonable nor just. It understands how delay functions as a weapon. It understands how the people with the least recourse are the most reliably destroyed.

Dickens knew that the cruellest thing a corrupt system can do is not to break its own rules. It’s to follow them perfectly.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

Ten-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

14 January – 18 March 2027

Thursdays, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time)

£400 for ten two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: Bleak House, Oxford World’s Classics, edited with an introduction and notes by Stephen Gill, ISBN: 9780199536313.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

14 January 2027 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

21January 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm28January 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm4February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm11February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm18February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm25February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm4March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm11March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm18March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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April 2027

Medea in GreeceSEVEN-DAY STUDY ON THE ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027thu29apr(apr 29)5:00 pmthu06may(may 6)9:00 am(April 29) 5:00 pm - (May 6) 9:00 am(GMT+01:00) Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Jane Wymark & Keith Fosbrook Type of studyClassical, Travel

Event Details

We are now planning for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf, where we read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page and below to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Medea by Frederick Sandys, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

First performed in 431BCE, as the third – and only surviving – part of a trilogy, Medea remains one of the most-produced Greek tragedies. It is an exploration of the roles of men and women, both actual and ideal, but is it also an argument for sexual equality?

In a monologue addressed to the Chorus – our moral conscience – Medea produces a memorable assertion about a gap in understanding between men and women. She tells us that men

“. . . say that we live a life free from danger at home, while they fight with the spear. They are so wrong! For I would rather take my stand three times with a shield in battle than once give birth to a child.“

We know that in Athens, women were not permitted to exercise legal, economic or social autonomy. How can we therefore explain the fact that the tragic plays that survive often portray them as having influential social and moral force? Can we think of Euripides in particular as a kind of proto-feminist? There are many occasions in Medea and other of his plays when his characters express damning general criticisms of women. Could a ‘proto-feminist’ be also a misogynist?

Medea has already committed two murders, both of them in service of Jason – who subsequently abandons her in favour of a younger and richer woman. The precise details of her plotting of revenge on him are so gruesome that we may struggle to feel sympathy for her. If one wanted to write a play about ‘proto-feminism’, would one not try to make the central character more engaging?

But Euripides is not trying to create a sympathetic character to whom we can relate in an easy, comfortable way. His aim is to confront us with something truly shocking and to explore issues which we might choose to avoid. It is possible to compare Medea with Oedipus, even though the contrasts are obvious: one acts from good intentions and has no idea of the terrible deeds he has done, whereas the other acts from malign intent and knows exactly what terrible things she has done and intends to do. The similarities lie in the way they both dominate their plays, being hardly ever off stage, and act as chief protagonists who determine the course of events, by their bold actions confronting things we might prefer to turn away from. And perhaps this is why Euripides can appear so modern to us. Terrible things breed in broken hearts.

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Euripides’ Medea on the island of Agistri: Thursday 29 April-Thursday 6 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark and Keith Fosbrook

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sights, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read Medea, we recommend the Norton Critical Edition, translated and edited by Sheila Murnaghan, ISBN13: 9780393265453.

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – Medea’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Room and half board (breakfast and dinner each day) will be arranged with the hotel by the individual participant and paid for directly to them. A deposit to cover accommodation for two nights will be required by the hotel on booking. We will send you full contact details for payment on registration. We have set out the anticipated charges below, but these may be subject to change at the time of booking at the discretion of the hotel.

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Please consider sharing accommodation with another participant as this helps us to ensure that everyone can stay on site; double and triple rooms offer split levels and so allow sharers a significant degree of personal privacy.

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Flights to Athens: when booking please make sure you can arrive at the port of Piraeus by 15.00 local time on the first day of your study to catch the ferry. We will not be meeting formally on the final day of the study, so you have choices about your return (ferries are frequent and the travel time to Piraeus is one hour) but participants normally leave Agistri at around 09.00.

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Insurance: we hope this will be entirely redundant, but we ask you to arrange your own travel and health insurance to protect you in case of anything untoward happening. We will ask you for details of the insurance provider and reference number, as well as your mobile phone number and details of next of kin to add to our (confidential) records for use during the study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark & Keith Fosbrook

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Time

29 April 2027 5:00 pm - 6 May 2027 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

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PAYMENT OF REGISTRATION FEE

The payment of £100 reserves your place on Medea on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

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May 2027

The Odyssey in GreeceSEVEN-DAY TRAVEL STUDY ON THE GREEK ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027sat08may(may 8)5:00 pmsat15(may 15)9:00 am5:00 pm - 9:00 am (15)(GMT+01:00) Agistri, Greece Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Alison Cable & Susanna Taggart Type of studyClassical, Travel

Event Details

We are now planning for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf to read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Odysseus and Calypso, Max Beckmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will —sing for our time too.”

The opening lines of Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Odyssey

In May 2027, for the sixth year running, we’ll be returning to Agistri – our Greek home-from-home – to study Homer’s Odyssey for one week. The Odyssey is a meditation on identity, homecoming, and finding one’s place in the world. Full of complex relationships and characters – including a wealth of compelling female figures – the poem explores hospitality, exile, and what it means to encounter and understand difference. It is also a collection of thrilling adventures, featuring our ‘hero’ pitted against fantastical monsters, seductive sorceresses, and the forces of nature.

The Odyssey continues to inspire artists more than two and a half millennia after it was composed. Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary film adaptation is now introducing the epic to a new generation, offering not a literal translation but a cinematic reimagining that uses the language of film – scale, imagery and narrative – to capture something of the poem’s richness and emotional power. The film is a reminder that Homer’s works are not simply monuments of the ancient world but living stories that continue to invite fresh interpretations.

Homer’s works form the foundation of Western civilisation, and their influence remains very much alive in the modern world; even on a first reading, the characters, themes and events can feel strikingly familiar. Those who have read The Iliad will recognise echoes of its world and witness the continuing stories of many of its central figures, but no prior knowledge is needed. On the island, we’ll be reading Homer in the land where it was composed and performed, where the landscape itself seems to reflect and illuminate the beauty of the language and themes. Each year we find that studying as a residential group creates fresh, rich understandings and new connections with both the work and one another.

This will be the fourth time we embark on reading the vivid and gripping Odyssey on Agistri. Our study will use Homer’s epic poem to explore closely the guest-host relationship, the defining struggle of humans against overwhelming nature, the experience of selfhood in foreign spaces, our understanding of the heroic, and the role of myth and epic in lived experience. Facilitators for the study are Salon Director Toby Brothers, together with Alison Cable and Susanna Taggart. Susanna, who combines her love of Ancient Greek literature with her professional life as a clinical psychologist, will bring to the discussion insights into the psychological challenges of post-combat living for returning soldiers, their loved ones, and communities.

As a complement to the textual study, writer and facilitator Alison Cable will lead a creative workshop inspired by Penelope, who weaves as an act of both duty and quiet resistance. Through a gentle introduction to off-loom weaving, participants will experience the rhythm of warp and weft as a way of thinking about pattern, connection and making. Alongside this hands-on exploration, through creative writing we will invite participants to weave words together in response to The Odyssey and its enduring themes. The landscape, visual art, poetry, and conversations throughout the week may also offer further inspiration for creative reflection.

The venue we have chosen for our stay on the beautiful and quiet island of Agistri is a small family-run hotel, easily accessible (just one hour by ferry from Athens). It provides the perfect setting for our study, offering a relaxing atmosphere, excellent food and opportunities for additional cultural and recreational activities. As one former participant commented: “The beauty and pleasure of the surroundings soothed my soul, leaving me feeling refreshed and connected to the literature and the group in ways I couldn’t have experienced at home.” Do come and join us!

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Homer’s Odyssey on the island of Agistri: Saturday 8-Saturday 15 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Alison Cable and Susanna Taggart

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sights, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey (Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140268867). We also recommend listening to Ian McKellen’s audio reading of Robert Fagles’ translation as a great way to experience The Odyssey in preparation for the study.

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – Odyssey’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Alison Cable & Susanna Taggart

Learn More

Time

8 May 2027 5:00 pm - 15 May 2027 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

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Location

Agistri, Greece

Book this Salon

PAYMENT OF REGISTRATION FEE

The payment of £100 reserves your place on The Odyssey on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

Enquire before you buy

The Bacchae & The Birds in GreeceSEVEN-DAY TRAVEL STUDY ON THE ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027mon17may(may 17)5:00 pmmon24(may 24)9:00 pm5:00 pm - 9:00 pm (24)(GMT+01:00) Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Caroline Hammond & Susanna Taggart Type of studyClassical, Travel

Event Details

We are now preparing for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf to read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page and below to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Photograph of Roman fresco from Pompeii, Wolfgang Rieger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Join us on Agistri to study a wonderful double bill of tragedy and comedy – The Bacchae by Euripides and The Birds by Aristophanes.

“Light the fiery torch of lightning!
Burn it all, burn it down, burn the whole house of Pentheus!”

Euripides, The Bacchae

The Bacchae tells the story of how Dionysus – god of wine, festivity and frenzy – takes revenge on King Pentheus of Thebes for rejecting his power. Dionysus first drives Pentheus insane then lures him to the mountains surrounding Thebes. There Pentheus’ mother and a band of Dionysus’ frenzied female followers take their bloody revenge.

First performed in 406 BCE, The Bacchae is Euripides’ final play and was awarded first prize at the Dionysia festival posthumously. Considered by many to be his finest work, it is revered for the beauty of its language and the complexity with which Euripides addresses the issues of faith and society. There are themes too of a struggle between ‘civilisation’ and primal instincts, as well as suppressed emotions causing a threat to society.

Thomas Macaulay wrote: “The Bacchae is a glorious play. It is often very obscure; and I am not sure that I understand its general scope. But, as a piece of language, it is hardly equalled in the world. And, whether it was intended to encourage or to discourage fanaticism, the picture of fanatical excitement which it exhibits has never been rivalled.”

In Ancient Greece, theatre performances moved from tragedy to comedy, shifting audiences from horror and despair to lightness and joy. Similarly, we’ll move from the high drama of The Bacchae to the satire and wit of The Birds.

In The Birds, Aristophanes tells the story of how two Athenians, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides, leave the world of men in search of a city without pettiness and corruption to live in peace and justice. They search for Tereus, a king who has managed to change himself into a hoopoe, or so he says, and married a nightingale. Together with the birds, they establish a state in the ether and build a wall between men and the gods. The work of building their prototype community is interrupted by various Athenians keen to interfere, including a poet, a seer and a town planner. Finally, a delegation from the gods, outraged by the loss of access to their human supplicants, arrives for a final showdown.

First performed in 414 BCE, The Birds is acclaimed for the completeness of the fantasy world created and the lyrical beauty of its depiction of the world of birds. The social satire seems as relevant to modern times as when it was written. And there are some good jokes!

Combining a tragic and a comic play in one study allows us a fresh perspective on the elements of Ancient Greek theatre and insights into how dramatists connected with their audiences and reflected their world back to them.

We’ll be reading The Baachae from The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics, ISBN-10: ‎0812993004, ISBN-13: 978-0812993004) but all translations are welcome.

We’ll be reading The Birds by Aristophanes from The Birds and Other Plays: The Knights/Peace/Wealth/The Assembly Women (Penguin Classics, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎978-0141913223) but all translations are welcome.

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Birds on the island of Agistri: Monday 17-Monday 24 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Caroline Hammond and Susanna Taggart

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sites, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read both The Bacchae and The Birds (recommended editions are given above).

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – The Bacchae & Birds’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Caroline Hammond & Susanna Taggart

Learn More

Time

17 May 2027 5:00 pm - 24 May 2027 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Book this Salon

The payment of £100 reserves your place on The Bacchae and The Birds on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

Enquire before you buy

July 2027

Jane Eyre on the moors: reading & walking in the Peak District 2027FIVE DAY TRAVEL STUDY IN EDALE, DERBYSHIRE LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & ALISON CABLE2027thu29jul(jul 29)1:00 pmmon02aug(aug 2)12:00 pm(July 29) 1:00 pm - (August 2) 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00) Edale, Derbyshire Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Alison Cable Type of studyCreative Writing, Literature, Travel FrequencyOne-off Event

Event Details

*Photographs of our visit to Edale in June 2026*

The London Literary Salon offers you the opportunity to join a five-day study based in Edale, in the Peak District National Park in July 2027, where we will explore Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre — an invitation to read, walk and reflect in immersive engagement with Brontë’s novel and the landscape that inspired it.

How might we read Jane Eyre today — as a story of selfhood and rebellion, but also as a text shaped by gender, empire, class and desire? This immersive study combines literary discussion and walking on the moorland paths that inspired Brontë’s novel, with opportunities for morning stretches and reflective writing. A short train trip to Hathersage, the village closely linked to the novel, will offer further insight into the places that inspired Brontë’s writing. Participants may choose to walk the circular 8 km Jane Eyre Hathersage Trail, tracing the village, architecture and landscape that shaped Brontë’s imagination.

Toby Brothers will lead the literary discussions, guiding the group through the rich text with reflections that include psychological, feminist, postcolonial and queer readings of Jane Eyre. Alison Cable will co-facilitate and offer walking and creative writing space, encouraging reflection, response and imaginative engagement with both text and landscape. Together, we will explore the familiar and the overlooked: Jane’s struggles for autonomy, the silences within the text, and the ways literature continues to resonate with questions of freedom, identity and justice in our own lives, here and now.

According to the poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich:

‘The concern of the tale is not with social mores, the social mores may occur among the risks and challenges encountered by the protagonist. Neither is it an anatomy of the psyche, the faded chemistry of cosmic forces. It takes its place between the two: between the realm of the given, that which is changeable by human activity, and the realm of the fated, that which lies outside human control: between realism and poetry.

‘The world of the tale is above all a “vale of soul making”, and when a novelist finds herself writing a tale it is likely to be because she is moved by that vibration of experience which underlies the social and political, though it constantly feeds into both of these. In her essay on Jane Eyre, critic Q.D. Leavis perceives the novel’s theme as “. . . an exploration of how a woman comes to maturity in the world of the writer’s youth”. I would suggest that a novel about how a man “comes to maturity in the world of the writers youth” would not be dismissed as lacking in range or in Woolf’s words, “a sense of human problems”. I would suggest further that Charlotte Bronte is writing not a bildungsroman but the life story of a woman who is incapable of saying “I am Heathcliff” because she feels so unalterably herself. Jane Eyre, motherless and economically powerless, undergoes certain traditional female temptations, and finds that each temptation presents itself along with an alternative –the image of a nurturing or principled or spirited woman on whom she can model herself, or to whom she can look for support.‘

Adrienne Rich, Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman (published in the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre)

While Virginia Woolf wrote that the Brontës:

‘. . . seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation – they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.’

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1916)

We will be based in Edale, with accommodation confirmed at The Gathering, a combination of glamping ‘lodges’ and barns, with options for shared or single rooms. Walking across the hills and moors will offer space for thought and inspiration, but all activities are optional: indoors, we will read, write and talk together, fostering immersive engagement with text and the landscape. To round out the evenings, participants may choose to join the local pub quiz, or just take in the lively sense of the village community and place.

SAMPLE SESSIONS INCLUDE:

Morning and afternoon literary discussions with Toby Brothers and Alison Cable: close reading of key passages, exploring Jane’s journey, moral choices and the novel’s social and political contexts. Short walks with Alison Cable: gentle, reflective walking, with opportunities to use the landscape as inspiration for written response.

Jane Eyre Hathersage Walk: short train trip to Hathersage, to visit the village that inspired Brontë, with an optional walk to Stanage Edge, passing ‘Vale Hall,’ ‘Thornfield’ and ‘Moor House’, and the added bonus of Robin Hood’s cave and the gravesite of Little John. PLEASE NOTE: The trail is rated ‘moderate’, with one steep climb and descent; there is a shorter option to walk to North Leas Hall (the inspiration for Thornfield) and back.

Evening reflection sessions: sharing insights, discussing emergent themes, and optional participation in pub quiz (Friday).

JOINING DETAILS:

Five-day study in Edale, Derbyshire led by Toby Brothers and Alison Cable

29 July – 2 August 2027

£600 for the study and background notes, plus £175 for three days half board (breakfast and lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, breakfast on Monday) plus £100 initial deposit on accommodation at The Gathering, total cost £875.

Additional costs: participants are responsible for arranging and paying for their own travel, accommodation and additional meals and insurance. We have reserved a variety of rooms at The Gathering (an initial £100 deposit is included in the registration fee) and will liaise with the venue – participants are asked to advise us of their preferences on booking the study. Although we will endeavour to meet your requirements, we will allocate the reserved accommodation on a first-come-first-served basis, please consider sharing accommodation with another participant as this helps us to ensure everyone can stay on site .

We strongly recommend reading or re-reading Jane Eyre in preparation for the weekend so the language, ideas and vision of the text are fresh.

Recommended edition: Norton Critical Fourth Edition (published in 2016, this is preferable to the third edition) ISBN: 978-0-393-64050-2.

An initial non-refundable deposit of £150 secures your place on the study and a reservation on accommodation at The Gathering. The balance of £725 (which will cover the cost of the study, breakfasts and lunches) will be payable by 1 May 2027.

Any refunds will be at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to an administration charge.

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Toby Brothers & Alison Cable

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29 July 2027 1:00 pm - 2 August 2027 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Edale, Derbyshire

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BOOKING DEPOSIT OF £150 TO BE PAID ON REGISTRATION. THE BALANCE OF £725 WILL BE PAYABLE BY BANK TRANSFER BY 1 MAY 2027.

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