Against the Odds: how women writers found their voices and got published
Virginia Woolf said that ‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things.’ We shall explore this concept as it applies to women writers in Britain from the 17th to the early 19th century. Using a mix of literary texts we shall focus … More details …
Selected novels of Jane Austen
Austen’s use of irony, social commentary, humour and realism are some of the reasons why her novels have remained popular over the last 200 years. This course will look at Sense and Sensibility (1811) which an early review described as … More details …
On Extended Wings – Six modern American poets
Over the last hundred years American poets have assimilated a huge range of influences including jazz and blues, the new psychologies, advertising, film, and a variety of landscapes from Boston to the Rockies. And while recognising the importance of the … More details …
A view of the 40s: Green, Euphan Todd & Taylor. Comedies of manners?
Henry Green’s Loving was published in 1945; for 1946 we have Miss Ranskill comes Home, by an author who most people probably think of as a children’s author, Barbara Euphon Todd. Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour was published … More details …
Calling all Trollopes!
The first two weeks of the course will be spent looking at Miss Mackenzie (1865) who is described as ‘neither beautiful nor clever’ and is plagued by unsuitable suitors when she inherits a sizeable sum of money. This novel is … More details …
‘The World’s Wife’: Carol Ann Duffy
‘The World’s Wife’ is a collection of 30 dramatic monologues in which Carol Ann Duffy pursues one of her major concerns: to give voice to those in society who are not usually heard. Many of the wives portrayed may be … More details …
Three Comedy of Manners novels from the early Twentieth Century
This course is now fully booked. Please contact us if you would like to be placed on the waiting list in case of any cancellations. EM Forster’s, A Room with a View provides a glimpse into Edwardian times. Jump forward … More details …
Poetry and the Passage of Time
The passage of time is a theme explored by many poets. In this three-week course we’ll read and discuss poems from the Bloodaxe anthology, Being Human (2011), which includes a wide variety of poetry from this and the previous century, … More details …
David Copperfield – The Personal History of…..by Charles Dickens
This five week course will study Dickens’s most autobiographical novel – The Personal History of David Copperfield. Serialised between 1849 – 1850, it only emerged much later that so much of David’s life has its roots in Dickens’s own early … More details …
Modern European Poetry
Since the second World War a number of poets have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. These include the Polish poets, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, the Italian poets, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Eugenio Montale. And many European poets have been … More details …
Discussing short stories
Are these stories a form of armchair time-travel? We begin our journey in 1706, with Daniel Defoe, and finish it with Anthony Trollope, in 1864, discussing one, possibly two, stories per session from The Penguin Book of the British Short … More details …
Elizabeth Gaskell
This course will study two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell was a hugely successful and popular nineteenth-century novelist who used her fiction to explore issues surrounding industrialisation, Chartism, the condition of England, position of women, class barriers and prejudice and … More details …
Poetry Matters
In 2002 Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books published Staying Alive, the first in a series of international poetry anthologies, giving it the subtitle ‘real poems for unreal times’. With 500 poems to choose from, this makes an excellent source for … More details …
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Writer, Feminist, Musicologist and Political Activist
This day course will look at Warner’s life, loves and affiliations. She was a writer of great imaginative scope and variety, encompassing fiction, poetry, journalism, biography and an excellent, still very readable, guidebook to Somerset (1946). We shall pay … More details …
Naivety in the novel: discussing The Go-Between & Atonement
Starting with Hartley’s 1953 novel, then moving on to McEwan’s 2001 novel we’ll be thinking about the way society is presented and the way the story is told. In each session we will discuss our reactions to a section from … More details …