On 17 July Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film of The Odyssey finally reaches cinema screens, and on 19 July The London Literary Salon is doing something a little different!
Where Nolan has Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o, our own tribute to The Odyssey features Toby Brothers and Jane Wymark with special guests from the Salon community. No cast of thousands and no CGI, but together we will perform key passages from Homer’s epic in The Odyssey Live! spoken aloud, as Homer intended.
“We’re excited to see what Christopher Nolan has done with this 3,000-year-old tale, but we’re celebrating the origins of The Odyssey as part of an oral tradition, to be spoken live to an audience. That’s what we’re setting out to recreate!”
Toby Brothers
Most Salonistas already know that Homer’s epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are at the core of our collective cultural heritage. These are the original models for how we make sense of our lives through narrative. Even if you have not read the works themselves, if you have seen Star Wars or read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, if you have watched Ridley Scott’s Gladiator or immersed yourself in the world of Harry Potter, you have glimpsed them in the background.
The story of how we define ourselves against our enemies (who turn out to be not so different from ourselves). The story of the struggle to return home (both literally and metaphorically). These are stories that don’t just shape other narratives, but also how we understand ourselves. Three thousand years after creating these works, Homer’s vision still inspires us and clarifies the essence of what it means to be human.
The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis will hark back to these origins, offering the experience of seeing and hearing the words spoken aloud, just as the Greeks of Homer’s time would have done. Whether or not you already know the poetry, we aim to bring to life the beauty of the language and highlight themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 8th century BCE.
We will touch on the guest-host relationship, the struggle to reach home, the challenge of the soldier’s return, the difference between the inner and outer self, the shape of leadership, how we learn from encountering cultures different from our own, the press of the gods against human agency . . . all live issues in 2026!
Join us for our one and only performance of The Odyssey Live! at Camden’s Theatro Technis (Crowndale Road, London NW1 1TT). Tickets are available from the theatre box office with a Salon booking discount LLS15!
This Tuesday, 16 June, is known to Joyceans around the world (including many Salonistas) as ‘Bloomsday’, the date in 1904 on which Leopold Bloom took the epic fictional journey around Dublin described in Ulysses.
Portrait of James Joyce (1882-1941) by Jacques-Emile Blanche, National Gallery of Ireland, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bloomsday 2026 will see the final meeting of our current group reading Ulysses and the announcement of our 2027 studies of this extraordinary book starting on 12 January, with 21 meetings offered at two alternative times: 12.00-2.00pm and 5.30-7.30pm (UK time).
Toby Brothers, founder and director of The London Literary Salon has been leading studies of this legendarily challenging work every year since 2006 and is still finding new excitement in a text which she believes will leave anyone a better reader and a broader thinker. 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 – thanks, James Joyce.”
At The London Literary Salon we always like to mark Bloomsday in some way, often from our base in London and sometimes in Dublin, where we expect to celebrate the occasion in 2027. This year we will be holding an informal morning meeting on Hampstead Heath where Ulysses enthusiasts will read favourite passages from the book, followed by an online evening meeting where current and past participants in Ulysses studies will also share readings and appreciation of Joyce’s contribution to world literature.
For anyone in London seeking a theatrical experience of Bloomsday, our friends at the Balloonatics Theatre Company will be holding their fifth Bloomsday Morning Walk on Sunday 21 June, performing scenes from the book on the streets of Tufnell Park!
Photos of past Ulysses related events in London and Dublin:
Email us at litsalon@gmail.com with any questions you have about our plans to study and celebrate Ulysses.
Portrait of Christopher Marlowe, Corpus Christi College, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“The dangerous times and fatal genius of Shakespeare’s greatest rival” is the subtitle of Professor Stephen Greenblatt’s 2025 life of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance. In her review of Greenblatt’s book, Professor Emma Smith declares that “Marlowe’s life is chock-full of under-evidenced incidents that are charged with a thrilling imaginative energy. He emerges from fragmentary records already fully formed: a spy, a double agent, an atheist, a sodomite.” I am offering a single session ‘LitSalon Short’ to review the highlights of Marlowe’s brief, exhilarating and controversial life (1564-1593), before considering how art reflects life in the dramatist’s dramatic and poetical works.
On stage, Marlowe’s characters – Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus – demonstrate boundless self-confidence as they over-reach human, moral and physical boundaries, attempting to subordinate the natural order and the cosmos itself to their individual will. The language they use is filled with electrifying energy, breath-taking sonorities and dazzling verbal imagery.
Drawing on the depth of his rich classical education (the aesthetics and metamorphoses of Ovid, extended and elaborate similes à la Homer, the passion and brutality of Senecan tragedy, and the power of the persuasive oratory of Cicero and Demosthenes), Marlowe’s literary works also abound in the fruit of the humanist learning of his time, not least Ortelius’ influential atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), consulted to provide geographic precision and exotic, ravishing naming of places.
In the theatre, Marlowe pioneered what Ben Jonson called “Marlowe’s Mighty Line”: unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). In launching an assault on his predecessors and their “jiggling veins of rhyming mother wits”, he provided the standard dramatic literary form that was to be adopted and developed by Shakespeare and other later playwrights.
In the LitSalon Short we will focus on the two parts of Marlowe’s first great masterpiece, Tamburlaine the Great, using these plays to illustrate his linguistic pyrotechnics and literary genius.
Each Spring, as new leaves unfurl and blossom bursts, the Salon emerges from indoor hibernation to read Virginia Woolf in Alfriston, a village in the heart of the author’s beloved Sussex countryside. Close to both the country home Woolf shared with her husband Leonard until her tragic death, and Charleston, the rural base of the Bloomsbury group, where better to read this extraordinary author’s work?
In 2026 we mark the centenary of the period when Woolf began to immerse herself in life writing. Having tested her new narrative form in Jacob’s Room (1922) and moved on to the more successful Mrs Dalloway (1925), she began to consider how her work might overlap with the genre of the elegy, a phase of experimentation that culminated in the fictional representation of her parents in To the Lighthouse (1927), followed by the brisk and daring Orlando (1928), a work that deliberately ripped at the seams of the biographical form.
After exploring the limits of the gendered human life, Woolf progressed to Flush: A Biography (1933), a sensitive portrayal of canine existence that roots itself in the non-human world. This humorous and occasionally dark portrayal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog inverts the hierarchy of importance in which famous poets are purportedly more important than their pets.
Woolf continued in this irreverent vein by completing her only play, Freshwater, in 1935, a work designed to be performed for and by her immediate family, which revels in satirising her maternal ancestors and their famous friends. Throughout the play, Woolf affectionately thumbs her nose at the previous generation while also exploring how attitudes towards creativity and artistic endeavour shift over time.
So, our band of bold literary adventurers arrived in Alfriston from points all over the UK and North America to gather at The Lodge in the Wingrove House Hotel. Here we could gaze out (and, between sessions, wander) on Alfriston Green and out into the South Downs. Over the course of four days, we delved deeply into these two works by Woolf – neither considered amongst her legacy texts – and found great riches there.
I always grow anxious before a travel study takes off. Will each participant find their footing in the text and within the group, will we discover new territory? By now I should know that anxiety is part of the journey, and then – together – we are able to soar.
This study included elements of drama and visual art, beautifully facilitated by our resident creative consultant Janet. To ask a group of adults to create masks, don beards, capes, scarves and porpoises, and then to perform what is already an absurd play, requires an unusually game spirit. Luckily, we had an unusually game group! Each of these creative events expands our understanding of the core texts, allowing us access from a new and different direction. The play Freshwater had not become vivid for me until I watched our group perform it, and it was so damn funny! The resistance performed by the actor Ellen Terry in seeking to escape her marriage and the rigid gender enclosures and conventions of her time – yearning to swim, donning trousers, taking a younger lover – was playfully but emphatically subversive.
We found some undercover actors in the group and, in our reflections after entering the play, we gained a greater understanding of Woolf’s complex relationship with the Victorian Age and her ancestors and inspirations. Sharon Bylenga’s presentation on the Pattle Sisters, inspired by the current exhibition at the Watts Gallery, expanded our knowledge of this epoch and its unexpected creative innovators – unexpected because history too easily simplifies and forgets the narrative of an age.
Our reflections on Freshwater also opened up our understanding of Flush through the theme of liberation. Flush and Ellen are both portrayed as captive figures: captured in relationships that are meant to be defined by love. Flush yielded much more on close examination, Woolf subtly integrates a critique of impoverishment in London in the mid-1800s through contrasting life experiences and the politics of space. We also get an intimate understanding of the world of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her invalid state overlapping with larger social enclosures against which she is determined to create art with an expansive perspective, and ultimately to claim agency in life and love. Using the imaginative lens of the sensibility of her dog Flush, we enter the realm of animal understanding, bringing up much for us to consider about sensory perception, a life outside of measured time, the flexibility of an androgynous identity, and the adjustment of desires in response to primary relationships.
What is ‘one Self’? When Flush sees his own image in the mirror, the question raised is how do we know what is real? Flush is portrayed pondering deep questions: is there such a thing as oneself, separate from what others see? He presses closer to Miss Barrett – ‘that was real’ – it makes him feel complete. There is a moment when you knit with another, there is a kind of fullness, when you give up the Self in love.
There was so much more that the discussions – both formal and more relaxed conversations around food and drink – uncovered. Our time with Nash and Cate at the wonderful Much Ado Books in Alfriston was also inspiring and expanding. Nash gave us a glimpse of their vast collection of Book Art which, he explains, ‘is not just sculptures built from books, but pieces of art made with books, for books, inspired by books, art having to do with books.’ Being in the nurturing space of Much Ado Books – feeling a part of the vibrant community of lovers of words and books that Cate and Nash have created – and making our own art there was exquisite. Between the offerings of Nash and Janet’s guidance, each of us found our inner artist and a way to respond in tactile form to our immersion in Flush and Freshwater.
I am acutely aware that our present time is terrifying on a global scale. It seems to celebrate arrogance, ignorance, prejudice and greed. I know it is a privilege to be able to immerse oneself (yes, the self again!) in a beautiful place, in the company of hungry minds, to contemplate the work of a great artist. I also know that we need to feed hope within ourselves to remain actively engaged and resistant to tyranny. From these journeys we gain a greater understanding of both the possibilities and the failings of human endeavours, and we find models of resistance as we try to imagine ourselves into the better world we hope for.
All photographs courtesy of and copyright Janet Minichiello, 2026.
Portrait of William Faulkner, Carl Van Vechten, Creative Commons via Wikimedia
“Good God! William Faulkner. What can I say? Certain books and certain writers knock you to your knees and lead you to wonder why you even bother to get up in the morning and think, much less write. I said to Eudora [Welty] one night that I thought of Faulkner as the biggest, boldest mountain, and I’m scared to even stand at the foot of it, so vast and frightening it is. And she lowered her head and her voice and said, ‘I won’t even visit the country in which that mountain stands.’ So that’s my response to your question about Faulkner. He’ll change your life for sure, but he’ll scare you when the topic of your own writing arises. Go with God, baby.“
Tennessee Williams, interview with James Grissom, New Orleans, 1982
This Salon series – a first in its focus on the works of a single author over a sustained period of time; his influence upon several generations of writers following him in the American South and abroad in Europe and Latin America; and the voluminous critical heritage generated in his wake – explores the enduring legacy of William Faulkner, tracing how his radical experiments with voice, time and memory reshaped American literature, and how subsequent writers wrestled with, revised and resisted his influence. We hope that the ‘hybridity’ and experimental nature of this programme will introduce to some of our readers the works of great writers to whom they have not yet been exposed.
Over a number of months, we will engage in close, sustained readings of some of Faulkner’s major novels, including As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, works that fracture linear narrative, multiply perspectives and probe the moral and historical wounds of the American South. Together, we will attend closely to stylistic and thematic threads which we have come to consider quintessentially ‘Faulknerian’: his syntactic daring; experiments with stream of consciousness and shifts in time; refinement of the Gothic; mythic sense of history; and a relentless engagement with race, violence, inheritance and guilt.
From there, we will trace Faulkner’s influence upon a remarkable group of writers, some of whom were his contemporaries, others who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, most of whom were living in and writing about the American South but also in Europe and Latin America.
We will examine how Ralph Ellison transforms Faulkner’s techniques to explore modern Black identity and invisibility; how Toni Morrison’s own use of the Gothic genre both inherits and overturns Faulkner’s treatment of history, memory and race; how Flannery O’Connor adapts Faulknerian grotesque and violence to theological ends; and how figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Styron and Walker Percy engage his legacy across drama, historical fiction and existential inquiry. Other authors under consideration for 2027 include Eudora Welty, Javier Marias, Jean Paul Sartre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy.
We will ask pressing questions: What does it mean to write ‘after’ Faulkner? Which of his innovations proved generative, and which demanded refusal or revision? How do later writers reckon with the ethical and aesthetic burden of his vision of the South? This study will be attentive to form, style and cultural context, inviting participants to experience the profound influence of Faulkner’s oeuvre across generations and continents.
Our Faulkner series will commence with a three-day intensive study of As I Lay Dying, led by John Allemand and Toby Brothers, live on Zoom, on Friday 17, Saturday 18 July and Sunday 19 July from 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time).
For this, our fourth year of offering Salon studies in Alfriston, Karina and I have chosen Between the Acts as the basis of our second four-day long weekend spent in the East Sussex countryside – near Woolf’s beloved Monk’s House and Vanessa Bell’s Charleston – which offers the luxury of full immersion in a complex and lush book with a dynamic group of fellow explorers.
In this book, Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to the Second World War. Edward Mendelson describes the book: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in pre-war England. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails—but something else transcends—that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.
Our sessions are conducted in the Lodge at the Wingrove House Hotel, a beautiful space in which to delve into the intricacies of language and ideas, with Alfriston Green in the background beckoning us outside. Might we create our own Pageant using Miss La Trobe’s script? We might! And we have on hand the brilliant Janet Minichiello as our creative project coordinator; Janet is working on a Book Art Project with local bookshop Much Ado Books that will give participants an opportunity to create a material response to the text.
In addition to exploring Woolf’s writing, there are opportunities for early morning dips in the sea at Eastbourne, walking to the beautiful Berwick Church (which features Vanessa’s murals), and a trip to either Monk’s House or Charleston. Wingrove House offers stylish and comfortable accommodation with a grand breakfast spread that prepares us for each day of discussions, reading, discoveries and adventures. There are a few places remaining for this study, do join us!
N.B. Our first Alfriston study focuses on Flush, one of Woolf’s more playful creations that voices the relationship between a spaniel and his owner, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Combined with a reading of Woolf’s satirical play Freshwater, this four-day weekend (9-12 April) will also include a creative project and local adventures, as well as an invigorated discussion about the dynamic between animals and humans. We have a place reserved for the resident London Literary Salon spaniel (pictured above), who also plans to be present for the study.
Click on the links below for full information on the studies in Alfriston:
Within the Salon community we count many devotees of the writing of Virginia Woolf and every year we offer a number of studies focusing on her work, some online and others based in some of the places she loved. This autumn we will run the seventh in our series of Virginia Woolf travel studies in the Cornish seaside town and fishing port of St Ives, where we will read two of her most celebrated novels: To the Lighthouse and The Waves.
Although these books are fiction, each one – as well as a third novel, Jacob’s Room – features vivid descriptions of the gorgeous views across St Ives Bay from Talland House, the childhood summer home for Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and her family, looking out to Godrevy Lighthouse. The house was of enormous importance to Woolf, acknowledged worldwide as one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, who wrote about it repeatedly in her memoirs, diaries and novels. According to her biographer, Hermione Lee, “Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.”
Now the views of the sweeping seascape from the privately owned Grade II listed Talland House are under threat from construction of a block of twelve flats on a site below its grounds. Planning permission for the development was granted in 2009, but building works have only begun in recent weeks and the developers are now seeking permission from Cornwall Council to increase the height of the building, claiming that the overall scale and mass will remain “broadly the same”. As the council considers the application they face fierce opposition from Woolf enthusiasts – readers, writers and cultural historians – locally, nationally and internationally, many of whom have left passionate objections on Cornwall’s planning portal.
Opposition to the development is spearheaded by locally based heritage horticulturalist Polly Carter, who many Salon participants will know from her generous and knowledgeable contributions to our studies in Cornwall. Polly, who is developing the gardens at Talland House with plantings referenced in Woolf’s writings, is working alongside the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain to mobilise Woolf fans worldwide, including prominent scholars, authors and artists, to join local residents in campaigning to reject the developer’s current proposal and revoke the original planning permission.
Talland House and its history, together with Tate St Ives and the Hepworth Sculpture Garden form a significant part of Cornwall’s cultural heritage, attracting visitors from around the world. Best-selling local author Patrick Gale described the development as a “preposterous piece of cultural vandalism”, while our own Toby Brothers observes “the site for this proposed development is not only a national treasure; it is a global one. Thousands of people visit Talland House and its surroundings every year to experience the place where Virginia Woolf spent her youth and which inspired one of the most classical works of the twentieth century. This project would destroy an important part of British – and world – heritage. A building project of this nature benefits only a few – namely the owners – and disadvantages all who are drawn to it from near and far.”
According to the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain “The association of Woolf with Talland House is one of the UK’s major literary/house associations, akin to Charles Dickens with Doughty Street and similarly visited by hundreds of tourists. It would be cultural vandalism to destroy the view of Godrevy Lighthouse from Talland House.”
You can view comments about the development proposals and, if you feel strongly about this, add your own comment on the Cornwall Council Planning Portal (you will need to give a UK postcode).
If you wish to comment from outside the UK you can click on the same Cornwall Council Planning Portal link and use the postcode for Talland House: TR26 2EH
I am very sad to announce that Wendy Steavenson — valued Salonista and graceful hostess of some memorable Salon gatherings — died peacefully in her sleep just after Christmas. Those who knew Wendy, or who did studies with her, will remember her as a strong voice of wit, intelligence and humour. She was also incredibly generous — with her words, her appreciation, her offerings to the Salon community — and her passion for art was reflected in her work in the Salon.
Last year, Wendy joined The Sound and Fury Salon facilitated by myself and John Allemand. She threw herself into the challenging text, in spite of her struggles with both the narrative experimentation and Faulkner’s purpose. In one of her emphatic emails she asked me: ‘Why would he choose to write about such terrible people?’ I pushed back, trying to explain the importance of understanding the evil nature of the human spirit as well as the good, arguing for Faulkner’s deep compassion for all people in the face of the tragedy of American Southern culture. I think Wendy’s question speaks to her desire always to see the best in people, and her resistance to the ugly things that humans can do to each other.
I will miss her. I will miss her courage to speak up when she did not understand or accept a premise we were floating. I will miss her advocacy for others, and her energy in bringing everyone along to the beautiful things in the world.
Appreciation from fellow Salonistas:
‘I made a brilliant friend at a stage in life when we don’t usually make them. Pure happenstance, which is a wonderful part of the Salon. Yes, Wendy was demanding and outspoken, but she was incredibly generous and a great hostess with enormous style. We were from different worlds but had many things in common — chicken soup being one of them! Wendy was a superlative cook. Everything was joyous and perfect. She made a party for the Proust group and gave everyone gift-wrapped madeleines. Only Wendy would have come up with that! She was so courageous over serious illness and surgery a couple of years ago. Always up for lunch with me and Diana, always beautifully dressed “Armani, decades old” she said once! Edwin got on so well with Wendy and he too is very sad to think we won’t see her again.
Wendy spoke her mind. Not always agreeably, but we admired her consistency and occasional delicious gossip. Last year our older son was incredibly ill. Wendy phoned constantly to see how he was doing (miraculously, twelve months on he is fabulous again, but it was a very tough and long battle). We will miss her style, wit, intelligence and irrepressible get up and go when it came to celebrating and having fun. She was absolutely unique and I feel it was a privilege to know her. She was also so proud of her brilliant daughter Wendell, a prize-winning journalist and writer to whom we feel close and who will continue to help us remember her extraordinary mother.’
Sue Fox
‘Wendy and I sang Gershwin songs together and enjoyed happy lunches for more than twenty years.
We supported and comforted each other throughout the last months of the lives of our dear husbands: David and Peter.
I am happy she knew you, darling Toby and got to know Proust because of you.
She endured the most dreadful illness without complaint and with huge courage.
Kazuo Ishiguro in the Stockholm Stock Exchange during the Swedish Academy’s press conference on December 6, 2017, photocredit: Frankie Fouganthin, CC BY-SA 4.0
Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his ‘novels of great emotional force, [which have] uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’ (in the words of the Nobel Committee).
As ever, the enigmatic Swedish judges failed to elaborate in any meaningful way on this statement. How exactly does Ishiguro achieve ‘great emotional force’ in such cool, dry, almost formal prose? What or where is this ‘abyss’?
One answer might lie in the way Ishiguro typically foregrounds the influence of the more ‘minor’ emotions on our lives. Literature has always explored the big emotions: love, hate, anger, jealousy, shame, sadness, pride. But what about our more ‘petty’, everyday feelings: the small embarrassments, boredoms, inconsequential anxieties, irrational resentments, uneasinesses and mood swings that, if we are honest, fill more of our inner lives than those grand, noble, more ‘consequential’ forces?
It is these that Ishiguro shows guiding the trajectories of his quietly suffering characters, whose lives follow paths unseen to them but gradually unveiled to us as readers. Think of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day, shutting Miss Kenton out of their evening chats in a fit of pique over a misunderstanding, permanently losing the momentum of their growing intimacy and denying both of them a chance of happiness. Haven’t we all over-reacted and then found it impossible to reverse the consequences?
And in his more experimental novels, Ishiguro allows such feelings to direct the narrative beyond realism and into what at first seem like dreams or surreal landscapes, but which could also be interpreted as the waking inner life of his characters. Consider the long sequence towards the end of When We Were Orphans, which sees the detective Christopher Banks working his way through an increasingly surreal war-torn city landscape, apparently accompanied by his long-lost childhood friend Akira. Has this incredible coincidence really occurred? Or is the endlessly multiplying series of barriers Ishiguro’s way of representing the labyrinths of Banks’ mind, where a childhood trauma has never been resolved – to the extent that the past is more real to him than the present? Banks thinks continually of his parents (as does Ryder in The Unconsoled) in a way that is more childlike than adult: an irrational refusal to accept the possibility of their ageing and death. Does this perhaps persist in all of our minds, however much we think we’ve left the illusions of childhood behind?
The novel in which Ishiguro has most fully explored the potential of emotions to direct the narrative is The Unconsoled (which you can read with the LitSalon from this February). What we may uncover in our reading of this ‘difficult’ novel is that its impossible movements of time, place and relationship are directed not by the ‘plot’ but by the passing thoughts and feelings of its irritable, sleep-deprived, somewhat pompous musician-narrator. Yet these seemingly trivial, even tiresome interludes are gradually revealed to show something terribly sad, even tragic about this man’s fate (and indeed that of all the other men and women in the novel) in life: they are doomed (like all of us?) by their patterns of thought and emotion to remain forever unconsoled.
“I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1856
“I snicker at the neologism [“graphic novel”] first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a ‘sanitation engineer.’ ”
Daniel Raeburn (author and critic), 2010
Must great literature, by definition, be a slog? Difficult? Dense? Exclusive? Productive (of a more moral, dutiful, obedient citizenry)? And must literature that we readily absorb — that delights, entertains, challenges, changes or affirms us — be considered trash?
Coleridge railed against the novel in 1856, and he certainly wasn’t alone in his views at the time. (Though seriously, sir, if you think that this is the effect on your brain of Jane Eyre, what on earth do you think your opium habit is doing to your mind?) It’s no coincidence that Coleridge lost his cool the same year that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary emerged to great fanfare and an even greater outcry from the ‘Protectors of Morality & Art’.
Why all this panic? What was the novel’s primary flaw in the eyes of its many detractors amongst clergy, social critics and traditional writers? What was the true source of alarm behind all their dark muttering about the decline of reason — and with it, Civilization with a capital “C”?
It was this: by the 19th century a variety of innovations and systemic shifts meant that everyday folks, including women and the burgeoning middle class, were reading forpleasure.
Surely this cheapened Great Literature, which had previously been the exclusive purview of those sufficiently wealthy, privileged and educated to own and read poetry in Latin and Greek. Surely pleasure challenged the social order by leading to the atrophy of moral character, intellectual rigour and the capacity for sustained thought? Surely the novel was a wicked thing because it stirred the imagination and made readers yearn for lives and circumstances different than their God-given lot (not to mention for more novels).
What was the world coming to?
Now let’s consider the disdain Raeburn heaps on graphic novels in 2010, especially as I prepare to lead a study that opens with Alison Bechdel’s 2006 New York Times bestseller, Fun Home, a book which recalled Helen Vendler, the great poetry critic, telling our class at Boston University that “Every time a poet writes about a new place or topic, or brings a new identity to life, it’s like lighting up a part of the map.”
Could it be that Raeburn missed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus? Serialized from 1980-91, it brought the atrocity of the Holocaust to life to an expanded readership and a new generation, long after most of the world had settled for blaming it all on one country, then turning its back. Maus also centred the topics of scapegoating, complicity and individual and collective responsibility for one another during a decade when then-United States President Reagan refused to speak the name of the virus that escalated dramatically on his watch, ultimately killing nearly 100,000 people, most of them men who had sex with men and injection drug users.
I guess I should mention that in my childhood the only two books my mother ever banned were comic books. First, the Fantastic Four because, she said, The Hulk’s grammar was so bad. And then, an underground comic called Wet Satin that featured women artists writing and drawing about sex. That one I never understood, given that I’d scooped up everything from the diaries of Anaïs Nin to Portnoy’s Complaint from the pile by her bedside.
But perhaps I absorbed some of my mother’s disdain for words with pictures. Because when I visited Alison Bechdel at home in Vermont while she was writing and drawing Fun Home (due to her connection to my then-wife, who was one of the early out lesbian cartoonists and an editor at DC Comics), I was surprised by her fastidiousness — and that of every other person I met during that time who was in some way involved in the comics industry.
It was the beginning of my realising that graphic novelists aren’t just drawing stuff on the backs of napkins. They aren’t illiterate or careless, or just not smart enough to read without pictures. They are creating a new art form that strikes the central nervous system with the immediacy, depth and intimacy of the forms that preceded it. Photos of hands covered the wall of Alison’s study next to where she was drawing one sequence. Pictures of 60s-era clothing; painstaking attention to every historical detail. And novels everywhere!
Discover more about the power of graphic literature and contemporary memoir in Growing Up, Nancy Goldstein’s live online study exploring the 21st Century Bildungsroman, starting on 18 January 2026.
.jpg){kind=link}