Virginia Woolf

Campaign to protect views immortalised in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’

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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.”

Find out more about this story on the BBC News website.

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

Reading James Joyce with the LitSalon

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

At the Salon we are huge admirers of James Joyce. For a long time we have featured at least one study of Ulysses every year, as well as – at various times – explorations of the arguably more accessible Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, as well as the often bafflingly inventive Finnegan’s Wake. In all of these works Joyce shows us why he is so widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and influential writers of the twentieth (or any) century.

In January 2026 Toby will again lead a group of keen readers through the twenty-one meetings that follow Leopold Bloom’s Odyssean progress through Joyce’s native city of Dublin towards its concluding episode: Molly Bloom’s erotic and heartfelt soliloquy that touches on love, sex, marriage, desire, loss and so much more . . . Tackling Ulysses alone can seem like hard work, many stumble and fall in the early pages, but reading it as part of an engaged and curious group makes it so much easier and, believe it or not, great fun (Joyce IS a funny writer). As one Salonista explains: “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 . . . 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.“

This autumn, as a prelude to reading Ulysses, we are offering a study focusing on the brilliantly illuminating short stories in Dubliners. The fifteen stories in the collection, first published in 1914, remain fresh and vivid more than a hundred years later. They serve as a seductive gateway for readers new to Joyce’s writing: some of the characters and much of the atmosphere portrayed reappear in Ulysses, albeit realised in a completely different and innovative literary style. As the title implies, the stories are particular to a time and place, yet in our very different twenty-first century world the characters – their emotions, the experiences hopes and disappointments that shape them – are universally recognisable as human, evoked by a humane and clear-eyed writer of genius.

Our next Dubliners study will be led by Karina Jakubowicz, who many Salon regulars will know best for her expertise on Virginia Woolf (she is, amongst other things, creator of both The Virginia Woolf Podcast for Literature Cambridge and the Woolf in the World Substack). As a graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a particular interest in modernism and modernist representations of space and place, Karina is ideally placed to introduce this extraordinary work.

Dubliners, with eight weekly two-hour sessions, runs from 16 September – 4 November 2025.

Ulysses, twenty-one two-hour meetings, will run from 13 January – 16 June 2026.

In Search of Mrs Dalloway!

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Karina, Toby & David
Sharon & Toby
Toby by the Pyports lawn
David describes the Lushington Archive

The inimitable Sharon Bylenga, long-time supporter of the London LitSalon and Virginia Woolf devotee, recently discovered the depth of the links between Woolf and the Lushington family, three generations of whom lived in Pyports, a handsome residence in Cobham, Surrey. Sharon introduced us to Cobham-based historian and archivist David Taylor, author of The Remarkable Lushington Family, and the idea for a unique ‘in-person’ event was born.

On a sunny June Saturday, a group of enthusiastic Woolf readers joined us in the main hall and garden of Pyports (a private house, generously opened to us by the current owners) to hear David Taylor and Karina Jakubowicz, Woolf scholar, LitSalon facilitator and presenter of the Virginia Woolf Podcast, ‘in conversation’ with the Salon’s founding director and lead facilitator Toby Brothers.

Virginia Woolf herself admitted that Mrs Dalloway, a recurring character in several of her works of fiction, most notably the eponymous Mrs Dalloway, was based on Kitty Lushington. Over the years there has been much speculation about the life of Kitty (who, on marriage to the writer and journalist Leopold Maxse, became a celebrated socialite) and her untimely death. The panel discussed the extent to which they believe Kitty’s life was accurately represented in Woolf’s writing and, more broadly, the differences between the approach of the historian and the writer of literary fiction. Thought-provoking questions and observations from the audience about historical record and works of imagination completed a fascinating exploration of life and art, followed by drinks on the Pyports lawn where Virginia Woolf and Kitty Lushington once gathered beneath the ancient cedar tree that remains standing today.

For information about forthcoming LitSalon studies (including reading Woolf in Cornwall this autumn) please make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter and do check out Karina’s wonderful Virginia Woolf podcast for Literature Cambridge!

Reading Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day in Alfriston

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Just over one hundred years ago a group of artists, writers and intellectuals changed how we think of a special corner of Sussex – and a lot else besides. Here, beneath the South Downs and between the Ouse and Cuckmere valleys, is Bloomsbury’s country heartland. The Bloomsbury Group, as they became known for their London base, adopted this part of Sussex as their place of escape, to live their own lives in the way they wanted – independence, sexual freedom and a rural existence. 

Salonista and Woolf devotee Sharon Bylenga

For our forthcoming study of Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day we will be staying at Wingrove House, in the high street of Alfriston, East Sussex, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel, with roaring log fires and rustic-chic rooms, located just a few miles from Charleston House on the banks of the Cuckmere River. Here we will be perfectly located for exploring Alfriston and the South Downs that Woolf and her family and friends loved so dearly (the photos above were taken on a recent research visit so I write from experience).  We will use the Lodge at Wingrove House for our meetings – a perfect Salon environment complete with fireplace! – and I’m thrilled that my fellow facilitator Karina Jakubowicz will be joining us.

These long weekends away give us the opportunity to stretch into a book; finding together a rich weave of insights, ideas and connections between the text and our contemporary experience. As one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known works, Night and Day (1919) is a bridge between traditional fictional forms and her more radical explorations. The characters in Night and Day  probe and push against social conventions, but ultimately both text and the characters remain confined within the social expectations of Edwardian England. 

However, both on the surface and just submerged, there is another register of questioning and resistance. There is an opening out towards wider spaces, there is a pushing against the weight of the past. While the book offers us a variety of romantic situations that are not typical Woolfian fare, these relationships show fractures in the gendered spaces of the time. I find the tension that the book barely contains, the daydreams that threaten to overtake the social performances; give a vision towards the possibilities that Woolf would later expand into. It is an absorbing link in the ever fascinating chain of Woolf’s work. 

The Lady Vanishes – where are the women poets of the English Renaissance?

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Nicholas Hilliard miniature, believed to portray Aemilia Lanyer

What comes to mind when you think of English Renaissance poetry? Probably Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Perhaps Wyatt and most certainly Donne. We delight in their inventive iambic pentameters, their creative imagery, their musical verse that takes our minds back to a time of courtly intrigue and endless linguistic innovation. We get lost in their clever metaphors, and revel in their elaborate rhetoric.

But what comes to mind when you think about women and the poetry of the English Renaissance? The chances are you might think of the many, many women who appear in the poems by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Donne and Shakespeare. And this is where we find a disturbing paradox: while Renaissance women are everywhere on paper, it’s very hard to find them holding a pen. This is the conclusion Virginia Woolf came to in 1928, on speaking to a small group of Cambridge female students at a time when, after long struggles, women were allowed to study at university but still could not obtain a degree. Woolf, ever the storyteller, cast her mind back to the 1600s to imagine what would have happened if Shakespeare had ‘a wonderfully gifted sister’, how would her fictional biography go? As Woolf concluded, it ended badly.

Until very recently, if you wanted to read poetry written by women in Shakespeare’s day you would be in trouble. If you were really determined you might come across English women whose poetry survived largely because they were lucky enough to be in elevated social positions, the likes of Queen Elizabeth I, and Ladies Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. But what about the common woman? One who could have been Shakespeare’s sister?

In the last decades scholars have started scouring archives and libraries in search of women writers of the English Renaissance, and they’ve made surprising discoveries. Despite not being born in courtly circles and being mostly denied any education or professional path, some English women managed to write (and occasionally even publish) impressive poetry in the 16th and 17th centuries. So, who were they? And was their poetry any good?

I’m excited to be leading the LitSalon study Women poets of the English Renaissance, which invites readers to explore this previously silent canon and begin to form an opinion. Together we will let these poems live again by revisiting their dormant sounds, rhymes and imagery. The study focuses on three groundbreaking poets and their work: Anne Locke’s fiercely devotional poetry; Isabella Whitney’s mock ‘last will’ bequeathing London to Londoners; and the feminist poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, who came from an Italian-Jewish family of courtly musicians and is rumoured to have been Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’.

Together we will try to build a picture of these poets and their lives in the Renaissance world. And we will look to pair up their poetry with artefacts from that world, enabling the words and objects to converse across time. We will ask the compelling question: how does this poetry speak to us today?

Between the Acts – a novel for our times?

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Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, photo courtesy of Harvard University Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As I re-read Between the Acts in preparation for our first study based on the novel this autumn in St Ives, I wonder why it is probably the least-known and read of Virginia Woolf’s works. This was her last book – completed shortly before her suicide in 1941 and published posthumously – and I can’t help speculating about her thoughts and mood as she wrote it, what extremes of ambivalence and ambiguity it reflects.

In this book I hear an agonised, desperate cry against the forces – both external and internal – that were closing in on Virginia Woolf. Forced to move permanently to Monk’s House, her beloved country home in Sussex, to escape the bombings of London, she found the bucolic retreat that was so nourishing to visit became claustrophobic as a permanent home. This novel, written in the echoes of the bombing raids, in the knowledge that, as she wrote in her journal ‘each fine day may be the last’ helps us to understand the strangeness, the jagged vision of the book. The narrative is not apparently about the war, but the war informs the author’s vision in singular ways. 

Woolf’s rendering of a village pageant—the awkward but majestic vision of Miss LaTrobe as she tries to mirror back to a complacent people the enclosure of their history and a stagnant view of Britishness—becomes the central character in the book. This feels like a response from Woolf to her predicament: forced from her lively urban world into the constraints of a rural space, immersion in the ostensibly ideal village community threatens to suck her dry artistically.

Set in an English country house shortly before the Second World War, the opposing themes of unity and dispersal are invoked to consider how, in a moment between two horrific wars, people may find meaning in a changing world. These themes are figured in the characters of Bart Oliver and his sister Lucy Swithin. Bart is a ‘separatist’ by action and outlook, he misses the adventure and heroics of his previous life in India and his preference for excitement and unpredictability is exemplified in his impetuous Afghan hound. In contrast, Lucy is a unifier who brings together those around her and her home to create harmony, and whose faith speaks to her of comfort and an all-inclusive vision.

While unifying ties bind lovers and family, there are many moments in this work when those ties are critiqued or broken. The unity of vision that can be so compelling is also what underlies a fierce nationalism that threatens violence against those not included.  Unity may provide comfort, but it can also be suffocating, while the disruption caused by dispersal may offer possibility in its chaos.

Front cover of the first edition

Characters, events and thoughts disrupt the action of the novel, at the heart of which is a pageant intended to draw together the literature and history of England, as though in a requiem. The position of the play within the novel, the interaction between the performance and its audience, the scatterings of stories and voices across the production, all explore the role of art as reflective or interrogative of our lived experience.  As Julia Briggs suggests:

“The pageant expresses the need to forge a relationship with the past and its narratives, yet the impossibility of doing so at a moment of national crisis, when the familiar is giving way to the unknown . . . Living in an old country, writing in an old language, Woolf found its ancestral voices both seductive and inhibiting.”

Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life

Theatre is, by definition, a shared experience: group involvement in the apprehension of an artistic moment. The pageant strikes a balance between comedy and lament for a lost culture; it provides a unifying moment for its audience through the spell of language, just as its content tells of the progressive loss of community through a series of fragments and pastiches that the audience struggles to grasp. The title of the book shifts our focus from the play itself to the world that drives inexorably through the performance—between the acts—even as the play continues. Where do we find the real performance? How can art depict the present moment? 

More than eight decades on, I find Woolf’s evocation of the human condition remarkably resonant in our own troubled times and Alex Clark’s article on the BBC Culture website is illuminating. I look forward to discussing the book, the past and the present with other enthusiastic readers in Cornwall on our Between the Acts study later this year and there are still places available if you are interested in joining us.

Away from it all . . .

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Photo by Mauricio Muñoz on Unsplash

Even though days are getting longer, mornings lighter and sunsets later, February can be a grind. As we await the arrival of Spring we’re looking forward to getting away from it all in the coming months, so here’s a reminder that this year we have more opportunities to read great literature in evocative locations than we’ve ever offered before.

Some of our travel studies – Jacob’s Room on the Sussex Downs, The Oresteia in Greece, ‘Reading the Body’ in Umbria – are already fully booked, but there are still a few places left to read Homer’s Odyssey on the gorgeous Greek island of Agistri, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts in St Ives.

Some feedback from participants in previous travel studies gives an idea of what to expect:

The Odyssey on the island of Agistri, April/May 2022

“Discussing Homer whilst gazing out at the Aegean . . . heaven!”

“Rested? Not really, as there was simply so much to do, all of it interesting. Energised? Definitely . . . “

“Agistri and Rosy’s provided a wonderful setting which was both peaceful and invigorating. I so appreciated being surrounded by the beauty – bees buzzing in orange blossom – and being by, and in, the sea. This scenery that Homer would have known really enhanced the experience of studying the text.”

“The group was amazing and I loved your insights and questioning of the text. It was an amazing and enriching experience.”

“It was a wonderful trip . . . I think the landscape, especially around the islands, is so seductive that you can see how these wonderful texts were written.”

To the Lighthouse in St Ives, September/October 2022

“The collaboration between facilitators and participants 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.”

“Wonderful . . . 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 – knowledgeable and sensitive, understanding in depth not just the book but the group as a whole.”

Meanwhile, if writing is your preferred route to escaping the February blues, your creative juices are stirring and you fancy some armchair travel, there is still time to register for Alison Cable’s ‘Writing for Wellbeing’ workshop Journeys beginning on 20 February.

Email us if you are tempted by any of our studies and would like to know more!

And, last but not least, although it’s not part of our own schedule, we’d like to mention Salonista Harriet Griffey’s Writers’ Retreat in Spain from 10-17 June. Harriet explains:

Writers’ retreat with Harriet Griffey at Las Chimeneas, Spain, 10-17 June 2023

Whether you are completely new to writing or are trying to begin, develop or complete a piece of work, this writers’ retreat facilitated by Harriet Griffey (ex-publisher and author of Write Every Day) offers creative space to do so, along with one-to-one feedback and optional group opportunities to share and discuss your writing progress.

Set in the peaceful village of Mairena in the beautiful Alpujarra region of Spain, prices including full board and airport transfer (excluding flights) for a week’s retreat range from €860-€1050. Further details and booking at:

www.writersretreats.org

Closer to Fine

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Photo by Mark Lewis on Unsplash

August is the moment when I breathe in and gaze across the previous months of studies and work. This August feels particularly welcome: the Salon has grown with the incredible energy of the new facilitators (new as in going from myself and Mark a few years ago to a current staff of 13) and Nicky Mayhew keeping the Salon ship moving with communications, strategic advice and administrative support. We are also indebted to Sophie and crew at TPR media who have helped raise the Salon profile with interviews and news on Start the Week, BBC London and more.

At the heart of our work is always the experience of the studies themselves: the magical and enriching journey through the words into the blossoming spaces of imagination and contemplation. I am sharply aware that all around me the world is challenged with wars and violence, with climate change and suffering. I am also aware that the monsters of intolerance and prejudice are swelling, greedy in their appetite for discord. Sometimes I realise the Salon discussions offer an escape—an immersion in the artistic rendering of the human mind that emphasizes the lyric and generous visions of writers able to illuminate all aspects of our living.

But it is more than an escape. Within Salon discussions we learn to form and speak our insights to provocative ideas. We learn to hear each other and even—perhaps especially—to disagree respectfully, opening our minds to differing views and the reflections of others. Stepping out of our individual perspective and entering into the mind of an author, a character, another being—this is the practice of empathy. I experience this both in deep reading and discussion of the literature, and also in focused engagement with the participants in a Salon discussion. 

Mohsin Hamid recently explored the dangerous progression he has witnessed towards binary thinking and how reading and writing literature pushes against it, read his article here.

“I wrote this novel to explore what it has been to be myself, and also to explore what it is to be other selves. I intend it as a means for readers to do the same. We risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Perhaps fiction can help us investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the space that presently seems empty, impossible, but then, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all.”

Mohsin Hamid

August is also the time (well, of course, it should be July or earlier but, hey, we are all doing the best we can) when we plan and announce the bulk of the studies for the coming year. This has been a big year for Joyce and Ulysses (one hundred years since publication) and I am still basking in the afterglow of the three study groups—one for returning readers, with whom I was privileged to explore again, more deeply, this incredible work that celebrates curiosity, fantasy, and desire while skewering one-eyed prejudicial perspectives. The Bloomsday festivities—in London and in Dublin—were particularly sweet this year. The building Ulyssian energy has prompted a new ‘Slow Read’ of the great book, commencing in October, rolling forward in ten-week waves so participants can join along the way. This format echoes the Finnegans Wake approach that is now on its second cycle after four years of study, and it is so satisfying to dwell in such a complex text with the time and space for careful consideration. 

There are so many wonderful and unique studies coming in the next few months. I am still harnessing the right words to express the particular magic of the travel studies—this past year in St Ives, Umbria and Greece—these adventures create on-going groups connected through their combined love of literature and adventure. We are working on the travel offerings for the coming year, and this year’s September/October St. Ives studies are in place with one remaining space for Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as I write.

Thinking across the variety of genres, historical and social contexts that we offer in the Salon, an old verse from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls plays on the edges of my mind. My hungry brain seeks an answer, THE answer (how to fight inequities in power and resources, what is the best way to live, what confers meaning on our existence?), but the study of great writing bends my mind towards possibilities and means of expanding my understanding. Art can offer a gasp of insight to the big questions—not to stop the asking but to find a moment of solidity on the climb. 

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah

Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine

The Waves – novel or poem?

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The Waves, first edition
Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry

Is it a novel? Is it a poem? What exactly was Virginia Woolf trying to achieve when she wrote The Waves?

In his review in the New York Times in October 1931, critic Louis Kronenberger wrote:

“This prose, this imagery, is not in other words a medium, but an end in itself. The texture of the prose is a warp of sensory impressions woven into woof of poetical abstraction. As prose it has very often a high distinction–it is clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry. And since literature comes before the novel, and “The Waves” reaches the level of literature, whether it is a good or bad novel, or any novel at all, is not really important. Bernard’s summing up at the end, for instance, of what their lives have meant–a cohesive, exquisite and sometimes moving stretch of writing–must be allowed, if no precedent exists for it, to set its own.”

Over the years The Waves has remained one of Woolf’s lesser-known works, perhaps because it defies categorisation and lacks the narrative unity of novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Yes, it can seem difficult, but it is also extraordinarily beautiful, the writing complex and daring. There will be much to discuss during our time in St Ives and two places remain on the Salon study this October!

Paying Attention: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’

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I’ve been thinking a lot about close reading, the kind we do at LitSalon, not the lazy before-bed turning of pages or the rushed speed read of the latest bestseller. The world rushes past us, dips and dodges like a butterfly, but we often fail to notice the markings on its wings. For me, attentive reading can be my moment of watching the butterfly, attending to it. 

In Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf is paying attention to moments where the human and natural worlds intermingle.  The “zig-zag flights” of butterflies are not unlike the random movements of people through the gardens, all the while a snail slogs linearly toward its goal.  We readers are given the opportunity to pause and relish the details — flashes of colour and snatches of conversations — for example, eavesdropping on a married couple contemplating past lovers:

“How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly.”

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

Woolf’s painterly style invites us to contemplate the words visually, and in these moments at Kew Gardens are distilled a thousand dreams — the human and natural worlds collide in an image where dragonflies contain passions and people are the garden:

“Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.”

At LitSalon, we practise and celebrate slow reading as a communal act as well as individual activity. Committing to a study is committing to close reading, collaborative meaning-making, and the idea that great thinkers and beautiful words deserve our close attention, our time together. Noticing these fine details is the opposite of scrolling through Twitter, rushing past the rose garden.  And great words open up opportunities for conversations we wouldn’t normally have these days.

Yes, it can be hard to make the time for slow reading, but whenever I do, I’m always grateful. And I feel better, ecstatic even.  Indeed, it’s not a new idea that reading can increase our well-being and restore our zest for living. In his article The Reading Cure, Blake Morrison writes:

“Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”. It’s no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. When Odysseus is wounded by a boar, his companions use incantations to stop the bleeding.”

Blake Morrison, The Guardian, January 2008

It seems to me that now, more than ever, we can use the kind of healing that comes with careful reading, and that we can benefit from making the time to pay attention. Revisiting the words together expands our understanding, increases empathy, and reduces loneliness — we share assumptions and learn from each other’s reactions. We connect.

Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies.

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