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“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

1. Anchor: 6 January | 3 February | 3 March
2. 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

“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.

“I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”

Jane Eyre is a profoundly important novel. It is a stalwart of feminist literature, a challenge to social hierarchy and arguably instigated the ‘inward turn’ in narrative fiction, where psychological factors became just as significant as events in the active world. From the beginning of the narrative, Jane is an interior being, brimming with anger and an acute sense of injustice. As she navigates her neglectful family, abusive school and unnerving first job as a governess, she is challenged to remain true to her convictions and follow through with what she believes. 

In our discussions we’ll cover our personal responses to Jane’s plight. What does Brontë mean by presenting these challenges to the reader, and what do we make of them? Furthermore, we might think of how characters such as Adele, Bertha Mason and Mrs Fairfax elaborate on these challenges. Issues we may dwell on include: social injustice, the lives of children, postcolonial perspectives, feminist perspectives, psychology, and notions of space and landscape. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz
• Tuesdays, 19, 26 May & 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 June & 7 July 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Recommended edition: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780141441146
• £320.00 for eight two-hour meetings

‘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

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)

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

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

Published in 1930, As I Lay Dying uses thirteen narrators to explore the many voices found in a Southern family and community. Addie Bundren, the wife and mother to a poor white farm family, is on her deathbed. As her last wish, she requests that her husband bury her among her family in the town of Jefferson. And so, upon her death, her family – for the most part begrudgingly – follows through with her wish. We hear from everyone involved in the journey, including Addie from the grave—a testament to Faulkner’s creation of an environment so believable that such outrageousness is allowed. The humour is dark. You might not expect to laugh at the image of a dead women’s corpse falling from a casket into a river, but you will.

Faulkner uses multiple narratives, each with his or her own interests and biases, to create a puzzle that readers could piece together from the ‘true’ circumstances of the story. The conclusion presents a key to understanding the background to the central event in a way that traditional linear narratives simply cannot accomplish. With that said, in As I Lay Dying all of the narrators are believable, even Addie who is dead when we hear from her.

The most brilliant aspect of this novel is how Faulkner carefully weaves fragments and pieces from the many narrative voices to create a rich tapestry of often conflicting and competing perspectives.

For more information about our study series Faulkner & His Children, please read our blog post here.

JOINING DETAILS:

• This, our first Faulkner & His Children study, will be a Salon Intensive taking place over three consecutive days, led by John Allemand and Toby Brothers.
• Three meetings on Zoom: Friday 17, Saturday 18 July & Sunday 19 July 2026, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time).
• Recommended edition: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition, August 2022), ISBN:9780393614534.
• £210 for three-day study.

JOIN US FOR THIS UNIQUE LIVE PERFORMANCE – USE EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT CODE LLS15 WHEN CHECKING OUT YOUR BOOKING!

To coincide with the cinema release of Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey, we have joined with London-based Theatro Technis to bring key passages from Homer’s magnificent epic to life.  

Salon founder Toby Brothers (who, over the last 25 years has shared The Odyssey with readers aged from 9 to 90) and actor and facilitator of many Salon studies Jane Wymark will present live readings of some of Homer’s most brilliant and compelling verses to tell the tale of the Greek warrior’s ten-year journey home to Ithaca, his perilous encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens and Circe, and ultimate reunion with his wife and son.  

After a short interval, audience members will be invited to join a Q&A session exploring why this extraordinary story of adventure and romance, written nearly three thousand years ago, remains relevant today.

HOW TO BOOK:

• The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis, Camden, London NW1, Sunday 19 July 2026, 3.00-5.00 pm
• Tickets are available from the theatre box office £20.00 (£15.00 using code LLS15 when booking, please add discount code at final stage of checkout).

“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

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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.

“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.

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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
• 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.

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

“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.

In this study we’ll read selected passages from Homer and look at the great visual artworks they have inspired. Then we will discuss Christopher Nolan’s recently released Odyssey film (opening in the US and UK in July).

The episodes we will consider are: The Sirens, Circe, Polyphemus, and Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey; and from The Iliad the death of Hector and the scene between Priam and Achilles. Here is a preview of the visual art we will discuss.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Sean Forester
• Tuesdays 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 11, 18, 25 August & 1 September 2026 
• You may use any translation of The Iliad and Odyssey you prefer. 
• £160 for four two-hour meetings

“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

“Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves . . .”

Jacob’s Room is widely regarded as Woolf’s first modernist novel, though it’s sometimes overlooked by even the most ardent of her readers. This is a travesty when we consider that the work is such a deft discussion of grief, life writing, and the role of modern fiction. It prefigures the literary playfulness of Orlando while retaining the depth she exhibits inTo the Lighthouse and The Waves. 

Jacob’s Room concerns the life of Jacob Flanders, a talented but unheroic young man who hunts butterflies as a boy, goes on to study at Cambridge, and then finally settles in London. His biography is roughly based on that of Woolf’s brother, Thoby Stephen, but in many ways his life could be anyone’s. As the quotation above implies, we see ourselves in a person like Jacob even though (or perhaps because) we only catch glimpses of him. 

Questions raised by this novel include:

• How does Woolf intervene in the classic hero’s narrative, and what does her reinvention of this trope say about masculinity and success?
• How does Woolf undermine traditional literary form? Keeping in mind that this is her first modernist novel, we might ask how she subverts conventional structures and eludes our expectations. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz
• Wednesdays, 12, 19, 26 August & 2, 9 September 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Recommended edition: Jacob’s Room, Vintage Classics, ISBN: 978-1784877958
• £200 for five two-hour meetings

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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

“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.

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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).

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!

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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.

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 edition: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0679772873.
• £490 for thirteen-week study.

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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.

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, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time), 22 September – 15 December 2026.
• Recommended edition: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0679772873.
• £490 for thirteen-week study.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

“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.’

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.

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.

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.