“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (William Blake, c. 1786)

Performed for the first time in 1598 (at the latest), with multiple revivals in his own lifetime, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most enduring plays. It lives on in the 21st Century as an example of both Shakespeare’s lyric mastery and his capacity to engage diverse audiences across time and space.

It has often been said that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was specifically created for an aristocratic wedding. Although there is no evidence to support such a claim, it is wonderful to think it might be true. An enchanted forest is the perfect backdrop for lovers to take their vows. But not all is well in this play’s magical wood. The Fairy Kingdom is in conflict, the ecosystem is in upheaval, and at least one jilted lover has her eye on a dangerous mate. Meanwhile, a human is transformed into an ass, and a troupe of ‘rude mechanicals’ nearly sabotage their own play.

In equal parts wholly improbable and fully plausible, this beloved comedy holds a funhouse mirror up to nature, one in which we may see distorted reflections of ourselves. Love-struck and desperate for freedom, the characters flee to the forest to escape the city’s restrictive laws. But the woods have a law of their own. The monarchs of the Fairy Kingdom and their subordinates fling the lovers into unanticipated bedlam. Believing they still have some control, the protagonists strive heroically – and hilariously – to win the hearts of their beloveds.

For centuries it was believed that on no other night than Midsummer was magic so alive. During the Midsummer festival, witches and spirits reached the height of their powers. This sinister aspect of the holiday hovers in the wings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From the moment this play opens, with Duke Theseus’s confession of violent wooing and Egeus’s threat to kill his rebellious, besotted daughter, we feel this comedy could take a tragic turn. Can love truly conquer all?

THIS STUDY IS NOW FULL– If you are interested in a future study, please email the organizer 

• Facilitated by Jane Wymark and Julie Sutherland
• Mondays, 18:00 – 20:00 BST, 10 May to 21 June
• £175 for seven-week study
• Meetings online (via Zoom)
• Recommended edition: Folger Shakespeare Library (editors Barbara A Mowat and Paul Werstine), ISBN 978-1-5011-46213
• To join email the organizer (here) for details

…Today, guess what, we became beekeepers!  We went to the local meeting last week (attended by the rector, the midwife, and assorted beekeeping people from neighboring villages) to watch a Mr Pollard make three hives out of one (by transferring his queen cells) under the supervision of the official Government bee-man.  We all wore masks and it was thrilling.  It is expensive to start beekeeping (over $50 outlay), but Mr Pollard let us have an old hive for nothing, which we painted white and green, and today he brought over the swarm of docile Italian hybrid bees we ordered and installed them.  We placed the hive in a sheltered out-of-the-way spot in the orchard the bees were furious from being in a box.  Ted had only put a handkerchief over his head where the hat should go in the bee-mask, and the bees crawled into his hair, and he flew off with half-a-dozen stings.  I didn’t get stung at all, and when I went back to the hive later, I was delighted to see bees entering with pollen sacs full and leaving with them empty at least I think that’s what they were doing.  I feel very ignorant but shall try to read up and learn all I can.  If we’re lucky, we’ll have our own honey, too!

From Letters Home, 15 June 1962

When Sylvia Plath died on 11 February 1963 she left a black spring binder on her desk containing a manuscript of forty poems with the title Ariel.*  The final five poems are a sequence about bees: The Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box, Stings, Swarm and Wintering.  In this powerful sequence Plath purposefully changes her poetic tone as she uses the natural metaphor of bees to explore issues of female self-assertion, rites of death and rebirth, creativity and survival.  She also writes with loving precision about the details of beekeeping and the bees themselves.  The final poem, Wintering, is a tour de force evoking cold and despair but, ultimately, hope for the coming spring.

Over the course of two hours we will study Wintering in depth, look at its form and construction and, through repeated readings, unlock the secrets of this acclaimed poem.

*This is not the version of Ariel published in 1965, which has four of the bee poems in the middle of the book, but Faber did publish Ariel the Restored Edition in 2004, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes.

Salon Details:

• Facilitated by:  Caroline Hammond
• Wednesday Evening: 6–8.00pm
• Single meeting study: Wednesday 12 May 2021
• £25 includes background materials and opening notes

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £25. Contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

6.5.21– This study is now full

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

When he wrote Birches in 1913, Robert Frost was living in Beaconsfield in England, far away from the New England woodlands of his childhood. Saying “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” Frost claimed never to have started a poem the ending of which he already knew.  This poem manages to be many things at once: a celebration of joyful childhood play, an interrogation of memory and a technical tour de force with a cascade of images rendered in iambic pentameter that comes very close to the sound of everyday speech.

Birches is one of Frost’s most widely admired and anthologised poems.  Over the course of two hours, we will work towards a deeper understanding of the poem through repeated readings, analysis and discussion.

Salon Details:

• Facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Single meeting study, Thursday 3 June 2021, 6-8.00pm
• £25 includes background materials and opening notes

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £25. Contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

 Toni Morrison, writer, professor and essayist on issues including race, gender and forces of life, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved is regarded by many as Morrison’s best work, and once you have spent some time in the text, it is easy to understand why. Morrison works to help the reader grasp the psychological devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery by close observation of a community of ex-slaves creating lives in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century.

This text is meaty and evocative, and also quite difficult to read alone. The work also offers endless possibilities in terms of discussion of the formation of self, claiming of self, mother/child relationships, the fury of love, the permeable boundaries between the living and the not living, as well as the more predictable (but no less provocative) issues of race, gender and role of history.

But what you need to know– along with the history and context which will be provided as part of the Salon–is that the writing is so gorgeous. Morrison tackles the most painful aspects of human experience with an honesty and lyricism that will leave you breathless. If this is your first reading of the book, try not to read around too much until you have read the whole book: many reviews and commentary give away the central traumatic event that Morrison reveals carefully and purposefully in her own time. I think Morrison is very purposeful in the way she tells this story—we will discuss the framing and the narrative progression and her purpose there. You are strongly encouraged to read the whole novel before the study begins– and then we will consider it section by section.

This study is appropriate for first-time readers of Beloved as well as those who have previously read and studied Beloved in the Salon.

SALON DETAILS 

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

 Toni Morrison, writer, professor and essayist on issues including race, gender and forces of life, won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved is regarded by many as Morrison’s best work, and once you have spent some time in the text, it is easy to understand why. Morrison works to help the reader grasp the psychological devastation wreaked by the institution of slavery by close observation of a community of ex-slaves creating lives in Ohio in the second half of the 19th century.

This text is meaty and evocative, and also quite difficult to read alone. The work also offers endless possibilities in terms of discussion of the formation of self, claiming of self, mother/child relationships, the fury of love, the permeable boundaries between the living and the not living, as well as the more predictable (but no less provocative) issues of race, gender and role of history.

But what you need to know– along with the history and context which will be provided as part of the Salon–is that the writing is so gorgeous. Morrison tackles the most painful aspects of human experience with an honesty and lyricism that will leave you breathless. If this is your first reading of the book, try not to read around too much until you have read the whole book: many reviews and commentary give away the central traumatic event that Morrison reveals carefully and purposefully in her own time. I think Morrison is very purposeful in the way she tells this story—we will discuss the framing and the narrative progression and her purpose there. You are strongly encouraged to read the whole novel before the study begins– and then we will consider it section by section.

This study is appropriate for first-time readers of Beloved as well as those who have previously read and studied Beloved in the Salon.

SALON DETAILS 

Clytemnestra, by John Collier, 1882

Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra—some of the most memorable female characters in drama might first have appeared on stage before an audience of only men (with the roles played by men, as well). We are not sure whether women were even allowed to attend theatre performances in 5th-century Athens. We do know, at least, that these fascinating characters were created in a place and time where women had little place in public life.

It’s remarkable, then, that the playwrights who brought them to life gave a voice to such noble, intelligent, passionate—and above all, strong—women who were keenly aware of the constraints placed on them by the society in which they lived. Whether in doing so the writers were portraying what they admired, what they desired, or what they feared, is much less clear.

In the six weeks of this study we will read six of the finest Classical-age Greek dramas from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—the latter, especially, showed a keen interest in the lives of women: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra; and three plays by Euripides, the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Friday evenings 7:00 pm – 9:15 pm
• Six-meeting study, 11 June to 16 July 2021
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
• Recommended edition:
  • The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm; ISBN-13: 978-0812983098
• £200 for six-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
  

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £200.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading discussions of great literature for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He specializes in works from the ancient, mythic and religious world. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and has been a passionate advocate for great books education since attending St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago Basic Program in Liberal Education.

“I’ve been coming to Mark’s discussion groups for about 15 years . . . Mark is amazing in his ability to keep the group functioning smoothly. He asks questions that get to the heart of the piece and he keeps the group focused on those questions. You don’t feel that he’s trying to steer us to any conclusion; he’s in it with us to figure out what the author is saying. He makes everyone feel welcome and their opinions are respectfully heard. He’s always prepared and totally dedicated to advancing our understanding of the great books.” — group participant.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.”

An Arundel Tomb, written in 1956 and first published in The Whitsun Weddings in 1964, can best be described as an almost love poem. Inspired by the 14th Century memorial effigy in Chichester Cathedral of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and Eleanor of Lancaster, his second wife, its much quoted final couplet has divided readers since publication. Did the famously difficult and misanthropic Larkin really write a tribute to the power of love or is he saying something more complex?

An Arundel Tomb is written in rhymed six-line stanzas, with a faultless rhythm that makes it a joy to read aloud.  Over two hours we will explore this surprising and moving poem about history, survival and love.

Salon Details:

• Facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Single meeting study, Wednesday 16 June 2021, 6-8.00 pm
• £25 includes background materials and opening notes

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £25. Contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

“The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;”

                                                      Philip Larkin

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Tree metaphors surround us – from back to our roots to out on a limb; seed in the mind to branching out; family tree, decision tree, tree of life . . .  Powerful symbols of the paradox between stability and freedom, trees can provide a rich starting point for the unfurling of complex ideas.

Much like the Greek (root) word for metaphor, amphora – a storage vessel used for transporting valuable goods – a poem can be a container for our rich inner worlds. So we will look to the metaphor and the poetry of trees.

In these four two-hour themed workshops, we will read carefully selected poems and prose about trees (e.g. Blake, Larkin, Oliver) as a starting point for writing, reflection and dialogue.  We will practise shared reading and use a blend of creative, expressive and reflective writing approaches – flow writing, poetry making, metaphor, life writing – as writing prompts. In this supportive, confidential space, you will have the opportunity to share your writing (although you will never be obliged to do so) and to reflect on others’ writing.

No formal experience or preparation is needed, just a willingness to give writing a go! Simply bring a desire to share, reflect and experiment with words (and paper and pen).  This workshop is about self-development rather than literary-development.

From a participant in a recent similar event: “I had fun playing with words and inventing my own even. I liked discarding the rules and just being free with the language. In that sense, writing the poem itself was an act of controlling and letting go.”

Salon details:

• Facilitated by Alison Cable
• Tuesday evenings, 4-6.00 pm
• Four-meeting virtual study: 22, 29 June and 6, 13 July
• £70 for four meetings, please use the Paypal button below

“Since we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it”

Elizabeth Bishop

Photo by William Foley on Unsplash

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet of details and absences. She explores the world around her, always looking for truth even in the most ordinary observation, with poems that are both controlled and expansive. Sandpiper, written on a return visit to Bishop’s childhood home in Nova Scotia, effortlessly evokes a moment watching a bird searching for food on the shoreline. At the same time she makes the bird a personification of herself, endlessly searching for something, something, something.

Sandpiper can tell us much about Bishop’s vision of our relationship to nature, uncertainty and art.  Through repeated readings and discussion, we will work towards a great understanding of this exquisitely constructed poem. It is also quite likely that we will spend some time on the question “Why do so many poets write about birds?”

Salon Details:

• Facilitated by Caroline Hammond
• Single meeting study, Wednesday 7 July 2021, 6-8.00 pm
• £25 includes background materials and opening notes

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £25. Contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The Windhover

Composed on 30 May 1887, Hopkins called The Windhover “the best thing I ever wrote” and, since its publication it has been celebrated for its daring, innovative language and stunningly accurate evocation of a kestrel in mid-flight.  The intensity of the poem’s rhythm and experimental use of form still has the ability to startle us with its freshness and anticipates the work of modernist poets on whom Hopkins was a major influence. The powerful ‘sprung rhythm’ meter makes it a challenging but very satisfying poem to read aloud.

Over the course of two hours we will study the work in depth, look at its form and construction and, through repeated readings, unlock the secrets of this acclaimed poem.

Salon Details:      

• Facilitated by:  Caroline Hammond
• Single meeting study: Wednesday 4 August 2021, 2-4.00pm
• £25 includes background materials and opening notes

“The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.”

Portia, The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare’s poetry is among the most-quoted in the English language. Many of us have committed lines to memory which remain with us long after the plots and characters have faded beyond recall. Though we can read or recite them beautifully, we may never have fully stopped to consider how profoundly these lines are connected to the characters or plays – or even what they mean. They simply stay with us for the feelings they stir in our hearts.

In this single-evening session, participants will have the opportunity to read some of Shakespeare’s most beloved poetic speeches aloud together and discuss why we love them (or do not), how they resonate and what they might mean in and out of the plays in which they appear. Together, we will discuss context, character and language to enhance our experiences with these richly nuanced lines. In sharing our insights with one another, we may come to a new understanding of the plays, characters, speeches, words and even ourselves.

We will focus on poetic speeches in plays that have not recently been explored in the London Literary Salon, including (subject to change) The Tempest, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and The Merchant of Venice. Prior to the evening, participants will be sent copies of the speeches from which to select a favourite to read (first come, first served). Depending on numbers, two participants will each read one speech for the group to discuss together.

No acting talent necessary! The facilitator’s background is in English Renaissance drama in print, the objective is not to hone dramatic skills but rather to gain new insight into Shakespeare’s words and the worlds of the plays.

Salon details:

• Facilitated by Julie Sutherland
• Single meeting via Zoom
• Monday, 16 August 2021, 5-7.30 pm (BST)
• £25 to include opening notes and text

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £25. Contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. Please contact us if you have any questions.

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Julie Sutherland is deeply interested in the capacity of literature—both read and in performance—to effect change in the human spirit. After completing an MA and PhD in English Studies and Seventeenth-Century Studies at the University of Durham, Julie returned to her home country, Canada, to teach Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies at the University of British Columbia and Kwantlen Polytechnic. She has also developed curriculum for Athabasca University’s online Shakespeare modules and created a Shakespeare-for-children programme for an outdoor education group on a tiny island off the Eastern coast of Canada.

Julie has been recognized for teaching excellence in Shakespearean drama in Canada and the UK. She regularly leads creative workshops on Shakespeare and other literature for the ReLit Foundation, a ‘reading for well-being’ charity based in both Oxford and Arizona. Julie has also worked in theatre production and administration and even managed to play Titania, Queen of the Faeries, in a semi-professional production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. -Marcel Proust

After completing incredibly satisfying studies of Ulysses and Magic Mountain, we have turned to the next big mountain of Modernism, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is my fourth tour through the Search— each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments This third volume considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you something about the world you live in– you will be surprised. The two groups who have made it through the first two volumes in the last six months are lively and welcoming– we have room for two or three in either the afternoon or the evening. If you have not read the first two volumes previously, please contact us to discuss. 

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: ” This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment  and obsession ,we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

Salon Details

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Monday afternoons 12:30-2:30 PM OR 3-5 PM (3-5 PM is full) 
• Thirteen Meeting study from September 13th to Dec. 13th
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright  ISBN-13: 978-0099362418
• £315 for thirteen meetings includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes & discussion notes

 Use the correct Paypal button below to register . The cost is £315 for the thirteen-week study–this will cover the entire volume. I will send along opening notes and critical resources once I have received your registration. Studies start September 13th 2021. 

Here is an avid reader reflecting on their love of this volume (while demonstrating the impact of Proustian prose on one’s own writing):

No longer confined to orbiting his parents and living for the freedom of a solitary walk, no longer living in thrall of adolescent hormones and grappling with the strange new worlds blossoming both within and without himself, The Guermantes Way finds our Narrator thrust ever forward into adulthood and the disappointing discovery that grown-ups rarely behave like adults, especially when the pride of ancestral inheritance is on the line and there are duplicitous societal niceties to abide by, while the utterly insignificance and inanity of it all are underscored to devastating though understated effect by the first real taste of loss that this age usually carries with it. This third volume of In Search of Lost Time captures the period when our window to early 20th-century Parisian society is finding his place in it, though, true to his nervous, writer persona, he seems content to observe (now with the emergence of a sly humor) rather than engage with these exalted figures whose human forms slowly pale in comparison to the larger-than-life names he has aggrandized in youth.

It is, I imagine, intentional that battlefield philosophy receives generous attention early in this volume, as everything that follows is revealed to rest upon a framework of military-caliber tactics, from love (or what passes as love within the confines of Proust’s created world — ye gods, do any of these characters know what a healthy relationship actually looks like?) to facing the Grim Reaper as he counts down the minutes to one’s predestined departure from this mortal coil to the carefully plotted choreography of maintaining superficial acquaintances to simply navigating daily life among even second-rate society when each moment brings a new potential for detonating reputationally ruinous land mines. If my piecemeal knowledge of foreign-language pronunciations isn’t too far off the mark, I’d go so far as to suggest that the first syllable of the titular name is tellingly reminiscent of the French word “guerre.”

“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”

 ― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he attempts to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature. As Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury exposes a crumbling world through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness and symbolism as connecting fibres against individual interior realities that must compete for authority.

This study will draw upon participants’ questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer when discussed, enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s vision, while those re-reading will find greater depth and resonance. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque; but as the pieces start to fit together, the complex and careful planning that Faulkner employs becomes apparent. Does the work expose the depths and hidden realms of the human spirit?  This is what we must grapple with in our study.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Tuesday evenings 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm 
• Five-meeting study Starts Sept. 14th, final meeting October 12th
• Meetings Virtual
• Recommended edition: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Norton Critical Edition (edited by Michael Gorra); ISBN-13: 978-0393912692
• £125 for the five sessions

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £125. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

The following quote resonates for me as to why it is useful to attempt to read a text that seems aloof or unreachable at first. Those who have participated in Salons may know what I mean when I say that the work comes easier when we consider it as a dynamic and motivated group- each person’s question or insight adds to our understanding. I also think that the Salon allows us to make the very private act of reading a part of the public world, and in so doing helps each of us understand our own thoughts about the work more precisely.

“There is a story of a celebrated Russian dancer who was asked by someone what she meant by a certain dance. She answered with some exasperation, ‘If I could say it in so many words, do you think I should take the very great trouble of dancing it?’

It is an important story, because it is a valid explanation of obscurity in art. A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say.

This is the case with The Sound & the Fury. I shall not attempt to give either a summary or an explanation of it: for if I could say in three pages what takes Faulkner three hundred there would obviously be no need for the book. All I propose to do is offer a few introductory, and desultory, comments, my chief purpose being to encourage the reader. For the general reader is quite rightly shy of apparently difficult writing. Too often it is used, not because of its intrinsic necessity, but to drape the poverty of the writer: too often the reader, after drilling an arduous passage through the strata of themountain, finds only the mouse, and has little profit but his exercise. As a result of several such fiascos I myself share this initial prejudice. Yet I have read The Sound & the Fury three times now and that not in the least for exercise, but for pure pleasure.”

– Richard Hughes, Introduction to The Sound & the Fury, Picador Classics Edition

“Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? She clenched her hands and felt the hard little coins she was holding. Perhaps there’s ‘I’ at the middle of it, she thought; a knot; a centre; and again she saw herself sitting at her table drawing on the blotting paper, digging little holes from which spokes radiated. Out and out they went; thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene.”

–Virginia Woolf, The Years

Each study in St Ives is magical. The light, the smell and sound of the sea gilds the intensive study with a unique sense of stepping into another world. This study of The Years, the last novel published by Virginia Woolf while she was still alive, expands our time in Cornwall to five days as requested by past participants. We will meet Wednesday evening for our first exploration with six more meetings spread over the coming days to allow time for enjoyment of the natural and cultural gems offered in this beautiful place. This will be the Salon’s first study of The Years; this study will have the exploratory energy that a first Salon study offers.

IN LIGHT OF THE CURRENT PANDEMIC, the dates for this study are shifted: Sept.29 toOctober 3rd 2021 …there are three spaces available.

The Years is described as a family saga–and is often considered more accessible than other works by Woolf. With the experience of many studies of To The Lighthouse, Between the Acts, The Waves and Mrs Dalloway, I have come to relish the subtle profundity beneath the language experimentation and interior explorations that Woolf offers. The Years engages history– the personal history of a family, the mantel of history of a people, the sense of a denigrated future in the shadow of historical myths and mistakes–and considers how various characters negotiate this troubled inheritance. Woolf moves deftly between the individual and the larger cultural landscapes–illuminating how one person can exist in their vulnerable selfhood amidst the waves of the world around them.

To understand this book, you will want to read with a wide awake mind and then re-read once you have played on the surface of plot and character. Notice how the descriptions along the edges—the fragments, the other stories invoked, the changing weather passages—all comment on and expand the central narrative. We will also consider essays from her work, The Pargiters — the theoretical framework that Woolf wrote alongside The Years but then excluded from the text. This has become available in Mitchell Leaska’s edition: “The Pargiters is interesting in its own right for the insight it offers into Woolf’s politics, which she expresses more bluntly in the novel-essay than she ever had before.” (R. Higney, Modernism Lab)

SALON DETAILS: 

• Five-day Meeting in St Ives — approximately 14 hours of study
• Meeting St Ives Cornwall; facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost £325 includes notes and critical resources (transport and housing not included)
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: The Years by Virginia Woolf (Vintage Classics Woolf Series) Paperback – 6 Oct 2016 ISBN-10: 1784872237
• If possible, please also purchase The Pargiters–  this book is difficult to find and tends to be pricey– if you can not find an affordable edition, please contact us— I have a few editions for purchase or loan.

To register for the Salon study, please use the Paypal button below to pay £325: (Please pay for the  room directly to No4St Ives once your registration has been confirmed):

‘A brilliant fantasia of all Time’s problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion’ The Times Literary Supplement

The Years is the story of the Pargiter family – their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs – mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London’s streets during the first decades of the twentieth century, as their Victorian upbringing gives way to a new world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing room to the air-raid shelter. Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel is a celebration of the resilience of the individual amid time, change, life, death and renewal.

Virginia Woolf:  “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, haf 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 surace 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.”

—“Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.

St IVES:  Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives.  The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity, historical inheritance and identity in her novel The Years. We have already completed four magical weekends with Woolf’s writings in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!

You will have the opportunity 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 there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse.

We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home.  For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died.  Although the complete family never returned to St Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.

Accommodation:  We are working with No4 St Ives which is just steps from Talland House and has an elevated position overloooking St Ives Bay.  It is a 5 minute walk from the beach and St Ives Town Centre.

Approximate cost: 

 Rooms at No4 St Ives range from £110-£140 per night– if the room is shared, the cost is halved; breakfast included. Some of us plan to stay Sunday night as well to be able to enjoy an extra day in this beautiful site. The entire cost is to be paid upfront. If for some reason you are unable to attend, we will work to find someone to replace you & reimburse you for the room but can not guarantee that is possible. The Salon cost may be applied to a later study. 

Train cost is approx.  £70  each way(cheaper if bought earlier) 

Salon cost is  £325: We will meet around 14 hours over the five days. The first meeting starts at 5:45 Wednesday evening; the last meeting is scheduled for 9:30-11:30 Sunday morning. On previous trips, many have stayed in St Ives through Sunday evening to have time for further exploration and reflection. Please discuss this option with Sue and Mike from No4 St Ives if you are interested. 

We will enjoy dinner out on Wednesday and Friday…other costs will include the optional boat trip & visit to the St Ives gallery. 

Getting there:  The train from London takes just over five hours, with one change at St Erth for the branch line to St Ives.

This event and other in-depth explorations of  Virginia Woolf and her works can be found on the website of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

Part of the challenge when reading Woolf is to understand it is not the action that matters but the impression of thoughts; it is by attending to the pattern and signification of thoughts and impressions that we will uncover meaning, innovation. As one of the primary modernist writers, Woolf plays with language; testing its ability to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. Her narrative form reflects one of the characteristics of Modernist writing in its shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, the loss of an old world in the violent destruction of war and massive social change, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in her work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner

There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text—book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying—but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the only way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.

The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing—even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man—thanks, James Joyce.

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader—a broader thinker—even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skillfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvelous work was immense.”

—Ulysses Salon participant
See more participant feedback here…

SALON DETAILS

A) DAYTIME: Tuesdays 2:30-4:30 PM   **This study will be VIRTUAL**   
B) EVENINGS : Tuesdays 5:00-7:00 PM  **This study will be VIRTUAL**   

• Both afternoon and evening studies start January 11th and finish June 19th (combined Sunday evening) 2022 ; there will be a few special Sunday evening meetings for both afternoon & evening groups to address the longer chapters.
• We will meet for 21 meetings; there will be a few breaks around school half-terms
• Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
  • Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition; (Penguin Modern Classics), ISBN-10: 0141184434. (There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.)
  • The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582
• The total cost for the 20-meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £445

TO REGISTER, Please use the Paypal button below to pay for the study; upon receipt of payment, you will receive opening notes and loads of resources to start the study.

For the daytime study on Tuesdays :

For the early evening  study on Tuesdays

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.