With this final volume of In Search of Lost Time we reach the end of the journey for the groups that have been studying Proust for the past two years, and I complete my eighth tour through this mountain of modernism. Each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments.

If you are interested in reading Proust from the beginning, please watch our website for the next Proust cycle that will commence early in 2027 and make sure you are signed up for our newsletter in which we announce new studies.

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.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Mondays 1.00-3.00 pm (UK)
• Eleven meeting virtual study (on Zoom) from 9 March – 15 June 2026 (N.B. no meetings on 13 April, 4 May, 11 May and 8 June 2026)
• Recommended edition: Penguin Classics Finding Time Again (Patterson/Prendergast) ISBN: 9780141180366 (the Vintage Classics edition: Time Regained ISBN: 978009936271 5  is also acceptable)
• £330 for 11 meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

With this final volume of In Search of Lost Time we reach the end of the journey for the group of second-time readers that has been studying Proust for the past two years, and I complete my eighth tour through this mountain of modernism. Each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments.

If you are interested in reading Proust from the beginning, please watch our website for the next Proust cycle that will commence early in 2027 and make sure you are signed up for our newsletter in which we announce new studies.

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.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Mondays 3.30-5.30 pm (UK)
• Eleven meeting virtual study (on Zoom) from 9 March – 15 June 2026 (N.B. no meetings on 13 April, 4 May, 11 May and 8 June 2026)
• Recommended edition: Penguin Classics Finding Time Again (Patterson/Prendergast) ISBN: 9780141180366 (the Vintage Classics edition: Time Regained ISBN: 978009936271 5  is also acceptable)
• £330 for 11 meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

With this final volume of In Search of Lost Time we reach the end of the journey for the groups that have been studying Proust for the past two years, and I complete my eighth tour through this mountain of modernism. Each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments.

If you are interested in reading Proust from the beginning, please watch our website for the next Proust cycle that will commence early in 2027 and make sure you are signed up for our newsletter in which we announce new studies.

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.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers & Ralph Kleinman
• Mondays 6.00-8.00 pm
• Eleven meeting virtual study (on Zoom) from 9 March – 15 June 2026 (N.B. no meetings on 13 April, 4 May, 11 May and 8 June 2026)
• Recommended edition: Penguin Classics Finding Time Again (Patterson/Prendergast) ISBN: 9780141180366 (the Vintage Classics edition: Time Regained ISBN: 978009936271 5  is also acceptable)
• £330 for 11 meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

This will be our fourth year offering opportunities to read Virginia Woolf in East Sussex, a county which in many ways became the writer’s spiritual home and where we can consider her work surrounded by some of the countryside she loved best. In 2026 we will have two long weekend studies in Alfriston, the first (9-12 April) focusing on her 1933 ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel Flush, together with her only play, Freshwater (1935); the second (16-19 April) exploring her 1941 novel Between the Acts.

Woolf is often viewed as a London writer, but much of her time was spent at her countryside home in the depths of the South Downs. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this landscape to her writing. Freshwater was first performed at Vanessa Bell’s London studio in Fitzroy Square, but it built on the playacting tradition that began at Bell’s countryside home, Charleston in Sussex. Similarly, Flush owes itself to a hybrid of urban and rural experiences, containing some of Woolf’s best reflections on what it means to escape the horrors of city life. While London has greatly changed since the 1930s, Alfriston still looks much as it did in Woolf’s time. Being there makes it possible to imagine a world where Lytton Strachey could be spotted on the high street and Duncan Grant might appear at the pub. To help aid this imaginative process there will be opportunities to visit relevant heritage sites including Monk’s House (the house near Rodmell that the Woolfs purchased in 1919 and used as their rural retreat) and Charleston Farmhouse.

In 2026 we mark the centenary of the period when Woolf began to immerse herself in life writing. Having tested her new narrative form in Jacob’s Room (1922) and moved on to the more successful Mrs Dalloway (1925), she began to consider how her work might overlap with the genre of the elegy, a phase of experimentation that culminated in the fictionalisation of her parents in To the Lighthouse (1927). This was followed by the brisk and daring Orlando (1928) a work that deliberately ripped at the seams of the biographical form. Having explored the limits of the gendered, human life, she then progressed to Flush (1933), a sensitive portrayal of canine existence that roots itself in the non-human world. This humorous and occasionally dark portrayal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog inverts a hierarchy of importance where famous poets are purportedly more important than their pets.

Woolf continued in this irreverent vein by completing her only play, Freshwater, in 1935. This work was designed to be performed for and by her immediate family, and revels in satirising her maternal ancestors and all of their famous friends. Throughout the play, Woolf affectionately thumbs her nose at the previous generation while also exploring how attitudes towards creativity and artistic endeavour may have shifted in the intervening years.

Toby and Karina will guide attendees through these two works, moving through Flush first. There will also be opportunities to consider the life and work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a selection of her poems will be provided for this purpose. We will then have our own performance of Freshwater with time to discuss Woolf’s interest in family history and her preoccupation with plays and playwriting. Reading these texts side by side will encourage us to consider Woolf’s views of the 19^th century, her interest in the non-human and natural world, and her unique sense of humour. Woolf is not often regarded as a comedic writer, but these two works prove she had a wonderful eye for the bathetic and the absurd.

JOINING DETAILS:

• To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Flush & Freshwater 2026’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £50. Full payment may be made later by bank transfer.
• Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz
• Thursday 9 – Sunday 12 April 2026, Alfriston, East Sussex
• This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Between the Acts and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We will also research outings in the area based on exhibits that will be available at the time of our visit, these will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.
• As in previous years, we are in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf, Flush and Freshwater during our stay there.
• £500 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs (please see details below).
• Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own travel, accommodation and any insurance required.
• We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £206.00 per room, rising to a maximum of £244.50 (charges vary across a range of accommodation). These rates are discounted for London Literary Salon participants, so please reserve your room as soon as possible after registering your place on the study and mention the London Literary Salon when booking.
• Recommended editions: Flush by Virginia Woolf, Oxford World’s Classics ISBN-13: 978-0199539291; Freshwater: A Comedy, Houghton Mifflin ISBN-13: 978-0156335409

‘Clearly, this city was expecting of me something more than a simple recital. But when I tried to recall some basic details about the present visit, I had little success . . .’

Somewhere in Europe, celebrated pianist ‘Mr Ryder’ has arrived at his hotel, where he is greeted with a high pitch of expectation. During the next few days he encounters many demands on his time, both personal and professional, and is whisked around the city and surrounding countryside in a way that is both bewildering and strangely dreamlike. Time and space appear malleable, apparently led less by the laws of physics than those of the emotions. Assailed by troubling memories of childhood, Ryder gradually realises that his upcoming performance will be about much more than the challenging postmodern music he will play . . .

When The Unconsoled was published in 1995, readers of Ishiguro’s previous works, and in particular those who loved his Booker-winning The Remains of the Day, reacted with a mixture of bafflement, confusion and sometimes downright hostility. Just what was this exactly?

While James Wood famously wrote: ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel has the virtue of being unlike anything else; it invents its own category of badness’, the New York Times Book Review described it as ‘the most original and remarkable book he has so far produced’ and, writing in The Times, Rachel Cusk declared it ‘A masterpiece. It is above all a book devoted to the human heart.’

Many have read The Unconsoled in relation to Kafka, assuming it was intended to emulate that writer’s work in some way. Other reference points suggested by readers include cubism and surrealism (in particular the work of Giorgio de Chirico), or the logic (or illogic) of dreams and nightmares; others have read it as a series of music-like ‘variations’ on a theme, or as a magical realist allegory, or an exposure of the wounding and trauma at the heart of modern society. Michael Wood pithily called it a ‘long metaphor for deferred and displaced anxiety’.

There is much pleasure to be had in the reading of this book. The absurd sometimes descends into hilarious farce, and Ishiguro’s celebrated prose is as delightfully lucid as ever. The cumulative effect of the strange narrative shifts, impossibly overheard conversations, and increasing anticipation is ultimately extremely moving.

On this eight-week study we will also take time to consider the background to Ishiguro’s writing of the novel. The enormous success of The Remains of the Day led to the author going on an 18-month international book tour, with its attendant disorientation and confusing, absurd demands on his time. Ishiguro has also said that the book’s genesis was a comment from his wife that dreams are a kind of universal language, which sparked his interest in ‘the grammar of dreams’. As he worked, he says, he ‘started to see parallels between memory and dream, the way you manipulate both according to your emotional needs at the time’. Thus, like all his work, this can be read as a study of memory, and how it can dominate our lives, for both good and ill.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight week study, live on Zoom, led by Lewis Ward
• Mondays, 5.30-7.30pm (UK), 13 April – 1 June 2026
• £280 for eight meetings
• Recommended edition: The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber & Faber, ISBN 9780571283897

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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 litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

This will be our fourth year offering opportunities to read Virginia Woolf in East Sussex, a county which in many ways became the writer’s spiritual home and where we can consider her work surrounded by some of the countryside she loved best. In 2026 we will have two long weekend studies in Alfriston, the first (9-12 April) focusing on her 1933 ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel Flush, together with her only play, Freshwater (1935); the second (16-19 April) exploring her 1941 novel Between the Acts.

As one of the key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, Woolf is often seen as a London writer, but she and her husband Leonard had an abiding love for the South Downs. Together they purchased Monk’s House near Rodmell in 1919 and used it as their writer’s retreat. Virginia wrote some of her major works there and the Sussex landscape was integral to her writing as she tried to capture what she saw as its unsurpassable beauty. There are a number of other Bloomsbury outposts in the area: in 1916 Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, moved to Charleston Farmhouse with the painter Duncan Grant, while John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova also settled locally.

In this novel Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to the Second World War. According to Edward Mendelson: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1,000 years of English history, together with a close examination of the intricacies of village life in England in the days leading up to World War II. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails — but something else transcends — that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” that one of her characters describes.

“She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. ‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered. ‘Curse ‘em!’ She felt everything they felt. Audiences were the devil. O to write a play without an audience – the play” 

Between the Acts

Miss La Trobe – passionate, demanding, visionary and frustrated playwright/director/producer of the pageant – yearns to have the self-satisfied people of the village and the great homes see themselves for what they are. She believes – as I believe – that art can illuminate people to themselves, make them grasp the history that precedes them, understand the contemporary moment in light of that history and drive out complacency, make the audience feel the horrors and the miracle of the world they occupy. The book is filled with moments of passion exploding, of submerged violence, of desires frustrated.

The setting of Between the Acts ‘somewhere in the south of England’ at Pointz Hall, could be a village very much like Alfriston. Among the possible activities we will include for our retreat may be a pageant of our own: how might we construct a mirror to ourselves—a historical enactment of the phases of progress and stagnation that have brought us to this moment in time? We will consider closely how Between the Acts uses the particularities of the setting -Pointz Hall, the surrounding countryside, unpredictable weather, the cultivated and wild spaces – to reflect how the backdrop of our daily performance of living impacts and sets the rhythm for our habits and encounters.

JOINING DETAILS:

• To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Between the Acts 2026’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £50. Full payment may be made later by bank transfer.
• Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz
• Thursday 16 – Sunday 19 April 2026, Alfriston, East Sussex
• This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Between the Acts and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We will also research outings in the area based on exhibits that will be available at the time of our visit, these will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.
• As in previous years, we are in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf and Between the Acts during our stay there.
• £500 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs (please see details below).
• Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own travel, accommodation and any insurance required.
• We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £206.00 per room, rising to a maximum of £244.50 (charges vary across a range of accommodation). These rates are discounted for London Literary Salon participants, so please reserve your room as soon as possible after registering for the study and mention the London Literary Salon when booking.
• Recommended edition: Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, Oxford World’s Classics ISBN-13: ‎978-0199536573

Henry James called Balzac “a final authority on human nature” and said that he “took in more of human life that anyone since Shakespeare.” James referred to Balzac as “really the father of us all.”

If you’ve read James, you will find this extremely surprising because neither Balzac’s life nor his fiction bear any resemblance to James’s own.

Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850) lived his chaotic life to the fullest. Life was one long adventure. Many mistresses, and perhaps some boyfriends too (his sympathetic picture of gay male characters is referred to more than once in Proust’s oeuvre), illegitimate children, crazy business schemes, debtors’ prison, law school (he dropped out), parties, travel – he never stopped. He was his own greatest creation.

In his spare time, Balzac managed to complete 91 novels, all of which are part of his lifetime literary project, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). If you hear echoes of Dante, don’t be surprised, Balzac always compared himself to the literary greats. Charles Robb, one of Balzac’s modern biographers, wrote of La Comédie humaine: “Balzac’s epic of modern life is the last attempt by any writer to comprehend and educate a whole world in its diversity, to offer a complete, unified, scientific picture of society and human experience.”

I know that in prior material for the Literary Salon I referred to Flaubert as the inventor of literary realism. I’m not stepping back from that, but the birth of literary realism wasn’t an immaculate conception: Balzac was there at its beginning.

Our work with Balzac’s La Comédie humaine continues with Lost Illusions (Les Illusions Perdues). Why? Mostly because the three-novel series (Le Père Goriot, Les Illusions Perdues, and Les Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) form a unified work that covers all of Balzac’s preoccupations. Each work, brilliant in its own right, is amplified in proximity with the others, uplifted into the highest stratosphere of French literature.

And, as a bonus, we’ll spend more time with Eugène de Rastignac and Vautrin from Père Goriot.

JOINING DETAILS:

• 10-meeting study led by Ralph Kleinman
• Thursdays, 7.00-9.00 pm (UK), 16 April – 25 June 2026
• Recommended edition: Lost Illusions, translated by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140442519
• £350 for 10 two-hour meetings

The London Literary Salon invites you to join a five-day study based in Edale, in the Peak District National Park in June 2026. There we will explore Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through landscape, literature and creative practice. This long weekend will be a living conversation between text, location and lived experience — an invitation to read, write and walk in immersive engagement with Brontë’s novel and the moors that inspired it.

How might we read Jane Eyre today — as a story of selfhood and rebellion, but also as a text shaped by gender, empire, class and desire? This immersive study combines literary discussion, reflective writing, and walking on the moorland paths that inspired Brontë’s novel. A short train trip to Hathersage, the village closely linked to the novel, will offer further insight into the places that inspired Brontë’s writing. Participants will also have the opportunity to walk the 8 km Jane Eyre Hathersage Trail, tracing the village, architecture and landscape that shaped Brontë’s imagination.

Toby Brothers will lead our literary discussions, guiding us through the rich text with reflections that include psychological, feminist, postcolonial and queer readings of Jane Eyre. Alison Cable will co-facilitate and offer walking and creative writing sessions, encouraging reflection, response and imaginative engagement with both text and landscape. Together, we will explore the familiar and the overlooked: Jane’s struggles for autonomy, the silences within the text, and the ways literature continues to resonate with questions of freedom, identity and justice in our own lives, here and now.

According to the poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich:

‘The concern of the tale is not with social mores, the social mores may occur among the risks and challenges encountered by the protagonist. Neither is it an anatomy of the psyche, the faded chemistry of cosmic forces. It takes its place between the two: between the realm of the given, that which is changeable by human activity, and the realm of the fated, that which lies outside human control: between realism and poetry.

‘The world of the tale is above all a “vale of soul making”, and when a novelist finds herself writing a tale it is likely to be because she is moved by that vibration of experience which underlies the social and political, though it constantly feeds into both of these. In her essay on Jane Eyre, critic Q.D.  Leavis perceives the novel’s theme as “. . . an exploration of how a woman comes to maturity in the world of the writer’s youth”. I would suggest that a novel about how a man “comes to maturity in the world of the writers youth” would not be dismissed as lacking in range or in Woolf’s words, “a sense of human problems”. I would suggest further that Charlotte Bronte is writing not a bildungsroman but the life story of a woman who is incapable of saying “I am Heathcliff” because she feels so unalterably herself. Jane Eyre, motherless and economically powerless, undergoes certain traditional female temptations, and finds that each temptation presents itself along with an alternative –the image of a nurturing or principled or spirited woman on whom she can model herself, or to whom she can look for support.‘

Adrienne Rich, Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman (published in the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre)

While Virginia Woolf wrote that the Brontes:

‘. . . seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation – they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.’

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1916)

We will be based in Edale, with accommodation confirmed at The Gathering, a combination of glamping ‘lodges’ and barns, with options for shared or single rooms. Walking across the hills and moors will offer space for thought and inspiration, but all activities are optional: indoors, we will read, write and talk together, fostering immersive engagement with text and the landscape. To round out the evenings, participants may choose to join the local pub quiz or a folk music night, taking advantage of the lively sense of community and place.

SAMPLE SESSIONS INCLUDE:

• Morning literary discussion with Toby Brothers: close reading of key passages, exploring Jane’s journey, moral choices and the novel’s social and political contexts.
• Afternoon creative writing and walking with Alison Cable: guided reflective walks on the moors, using the landscape as inspiration for short writing exercises and prompts.
• Short train trip to Hathersage: experiencing the village that inspired Brontë, with an optional walk to Stanage Edge, passing ‘Vale Hall,’ ‘Thornfield’ and ‘Moor House’, and the added bonus of Robin Hood’s cave and the gravesite of Little John.
• Evening reflection sessions: sharing insights, discussing emergent themes, experimenting with creative responses, and optional participation in pub quiz, bonfire, and folk night.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five-day study in Edale, Derbyshire led by Toby Brothers and Alison Cable
• 18-22 June 2026
• £550 for the study and background notes, plus £105 for three days half board (breakfast and lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday), total cost £655
• Additional costs: participants are responsible for arranging and paying for their own travel, glamping accommodation at The Gathering, additional meals and insurance. Group bookings for accommodation and optional guided walks must be arranged in advance.
• We strongly recommend reading or re-reading Jane Eyre in preparation for the weekend so the language, ideas and vision of the text are fresh. 
• An initial non-refundable deposit of £50 secures your place, with the balance of £605 (including breakfasts and lunches) payable by 1 May 2026.
• Any refunds will be at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to an administration charge.

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.

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 2 to 5 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
• 2 to 5 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.