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Salon calendar & booking

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).

‘they are ever returning to us, the dead’

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What deep or uncomfortable truths of the human condition does this book reveal, which might also apply to the non-emigrants among us?
• Who is the narrator, and what is his relation to Sebald himself?
• Who are the people described in the book? Where does fact and biography end and fiction and speculation begin?
• What is the role of the enigmatic, caption-less photographs dotted throughout the text?

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

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight week study of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants led by Lewis Ward (on Zoom)
• Wednesdays, 7.00 – 9.00 pm (UK), 16 September – 4 November 2026
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics, ISBN: 9780099448884
• £280 for eight two-hour meetings

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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.

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 editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1857152890.
• £490 for thirteen-week study.

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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. Please note that there is also an earlier study from 12.00 noon-2.00 pm (UK time) on the same dates.
• Recommended editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1857152890.
• £490 for thirteen-week study.

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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.