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

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 Windhover

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

 

“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.

23.6.21 Update: We are offering a second study as the evening study has filled

Salon details:

• Facilitated by Julie Sutherland
• Single meeting via Zoom
• Monday, 16 August 2021, 5-7.30 pm (BST) FULL   New time available 1- 3:30 (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.

 

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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. 

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Beginning 08 September, the Long Ago and Far Away study group will start a six-week study of one of the gems of the Icelandic saga tradition: Egil’s Saga, the story of the wily, Odyssean poet-warrior hero Egil Skallagrimsson.

The Sagas of Icelanders are the crowning achievement of medieval Scandinavian narrative and rank among the world’s greatest literary treasures—as grandly epic as Homer, as rich in tragedy as Sophocles, as compellingly human as Shakespeare, and as psychologically keen as Chekhov. Egil’s Saga tells the story of the larger-than-life Egil Skallagrimsson, whose veins run deep with both Viking ferocity and heartfelt poetry.

Long Ago and Far Away is an ongoing, weekly virtual Salon group that began in January 2020 as an eight-week study of the Myths and Legends of Troy. Since then, the group have continued together and met weekly through a year of lockdown, going on to read:

• over twenty Classical Greek dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides
• some of the oldest extant Greek myths in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymns
• Ovid’s Roman retelling of myths from Greece in the Metamorphoses
• foundation myths of Mesopotamia and the Epic of Gilgamesh
• the biblical Book of Genesis
• most recently, beginning April 2021, a first sequence on the Sagas of Icelanders

Long Ago and Far Away meets in six-week segments, with a flexible reading plan that follows the interest of the group. If you are interested in joining the Long Ago and Far Away group for our reading of Egil’s Saga, please email facilitator Mark Cwik for more details.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Ongoing weekly study, email facilitator Mark Cwik for details if you are interested in joining.
  
• Wednesdays 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm.
  
• New topic starting 08 September, 2021: Egil’s Saga
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface.
  
• Book edition:
  • The Sagas of Icelanders, introduction by Robert Kellogg, with preface by Jane Smiley
    (Penguin Classics, 2001)
    ISBN-13: 978-0141000039

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About the Icelandic Sagas:

As grandly epic as Homer, rich in tragedy as Sophocles, compellingly human as Shakespeare, and psychologically keen as Chekhov—the sagas of Icelanders are the crowning achievement of medieval Scandinavian narrative and rank among the world’s greatest literary treasures. They describe a world of a millennium ago that nevertheless rings familiar with perennial human struggles.

The forty-plus narratives of adventure and conflict that comprise the sagas are set in Iceland’s 9th- and 10th-century Age of Settlement, when a handful of families fled the oppressive kingship of Norway to set up new lives on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. It was in Iceland the era of a unique commonwealth of free chieftains with no king, clerical hierarchy, or armies, ruled by Viking traditions of honour and blood vengeance. Written down anonymously several hundred years later, the sagas look back on a pioneer generation struggling to forge and maintain a self-governing community in a harsh environment at the edge of the known world.

With economy of style and astute insight into character, the sagas portray poets, warriors, statesmen, farmers, and outlaws—strong and determined men and women who strive for power, wealth, fame, respect, and love in a frontier society that wavers between the rule of law and vengeance.
In our study of the sagas, we will first look closely at two of the short sagas, to become familiar with the unique literary style and the cultural background of these great tales. We’ll then lauch into the grand, multi-generational Laxdaela Saga, followed by one of the gems of the saga tradition: the story of the wily, Odyssean poet-warrior hero of Egil’s Saga.

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. 

For MONDAY early afternoons 12:30-2:30  pm: 

For Monday late afternoons  3-5  pm:

THIS SECTION IS NOW FULL

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

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.”

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he wrecked the holy town of Troy . . . ”

 

Homer’s tale of the wandering Odysseus and his quest to return home from the Trojan War has captured imaginations for two and a half millennia.

In his ten-year struggle to return to wife and family on his beloved island of Ithaka, the ever-resilient Odysseus roams to the edges of the world and confronts dangers and temptations both natural and supernatural. The giant man-eating Cyclops, the captivating call of the Sirens, the enchantments of the sorceress Circe, the dual menaces of Scylla and Charybdis, and the relentless anger of the sea-god Poseidon all threaten to keep him from returning to reclaim his place as king, husband, and father.

Throughout his travails, Odysseus relies on courage, perseverance, cunning, and craft, as his character is tested and seasoned. At once a story of the exceptional and the universal, the Odyssey weaves together themes of travel and hospitality, loyalty and persistence, wit and deception, growth and self-knowledge, marriage, family, and the longing for home.

For this eight-week study we will read Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the Odyssey that renders Homer’s epic tale in a brisk iambic pentameter and contemporary idiom. This study will be read-as-we-go, averaging about 50 pages of reading per week. The study will take place on Zoom. Each session will last 2 1/4 hours, with a short break mid-session.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Mark Cwik
• Eight-meeting study
• Tuesday afternoons 4:00 pm – 6:15 pm.
  
• 14 September, 2021 to 02 November, 2021
  
• Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
• This study will use the 2018 tranlsation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson. Please be sure to obtain this translation:
  • The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
    (W.W. Norton, 2018)
    ISBN-13: 978-0393356250
    
• £190 for eight-week study, includes notes and weekly questions for preparation.
  

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £190. If you would prefer to pay by bank transfer, please email facilitator Mark Cwik to arrange payment.

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If you have any questions about this study, please contact facilitator Mark Cwik.

“…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

The blurb for the 1997 film based on The Wings of the Dove refers to ‘a stirring tale of passion, greed and deception that has critics raving’. Readers of Henry James will recognise the truth that his novels always have a melodramatic basis to them, but more than one hundred years of literary criticism has also revealed a plethora of complex pleasures offered to readers.

Subtly portrayed psychological and dramatic tensions, a proliferation of poetic imagery and symbol, a rich intertwining of themes and multiplicity of elements (almost always) under the control of an experienced author are all present in abundance. On the surface we find some familiar Jamesian themes: the contrast (never simplistic or partisan) between Americans – New Yorkish and Bostonian – and Europeans (mainly English); a strong sense of the influence of place, chiefly London, as a centre of hypocrisy and human manipulation, or Venice, as a city which stirs up deeply ambivalent feelings about beauty and corruption.

Under the surface, we discover a subtle portrayal of different centres, or ‘registers’ of consciousness; a questioning of the concept of normative gender roles; a sensitivity to Art – in particular the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements – and, more generally, to themes of decadence and commodification in European culture. We encounter the mystifying powers of narrative, and the complicity of the author in the values he is critiquing. Add to this the significant appearance of mighty abstract concepts, such as Immortality, Redemption and ‘The Abyss’, and you may feel that the novel must be groaning under the weight of so much interpretation of meaning.

To return to my opening quotation, the deep power of this novel survives all the accumulated critical commentary because it tells a story of young people pursuing love and honour in a society dominated by devious manipulation. Our profound engagement with their plight gives us an experience of the tragic dimension of human experience. The ending – highly perplexing even by Henry James’ standards – has a stunning intensity. We cannot find time to examine all the issues raised over the years, but all of us can experience the pity and terror inspired by the novel’s protagonists.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Keith Fosbrook
• Wednesdays 5.00 – 7.00 pm
• 8-session study over 9 weeks: 15, 22, 29 September; 6,13, 20 October; 3, 10 November (N.B. no session on 27 October)
• Cost: £200  (includes notes and critical resources)
• Recommended text: Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition) ISBN 9780393978810

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £200.  Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

 

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 fifth tour through the Search— each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments

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, idealized experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

*This study is full. Please contact us if you have questions about starting “The Search…” we plan a new journey in January 2022…

Salon Details

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Wednesday afternoons  5-7 PM OR 7:30-9:30 PM
• 11 Meeting study from Sept 22nd- Dec. 8th;  (No meetings September 29th)
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright  
• £280 for 15 meetings includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes & discussion notes
• This is a VIRTUAL study– though if things improve, we will meet live in KT if everyone agrees

 Use the Paypal button below to register . The cost is £280 for the eleven-week study–this will cover the entire volume. I will send along opening notes and critical resources once I have received your registration.  

For WEDNESDAY either 5-7pm or  7:30-9:30  pm:

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

I’d  like to share with you part of Edmund White’s essay on this section from Andre Aciman’s collection The Proust Project:

“In these pages, Proust alludes to so many conflicting theories of homosexuality that they end up by casting doubt on one another — and on all such theories.  In fact they suggest, finally, that only the conventions of a few cultures (but not all or even most cultures) determine the definition of normality; mere convention and nothing more absolute defines the status of homosexuality.

On the face of it nothing could seem further from the Proustian position.  He starts out with the most extreme (and the most offensive) theory; that male homosexuals are inverts, i.e., women disguised as men.  this whole initial disquisition on homosexuality is triggered by Marcel’s realization that Charlus’s face in repose is that of a woman since ‘he was one.’  This is the theory of ‘the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man’ first worked out by the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868.

Proust plays with the theories and homophobia of his time — and exposes societal hypocrisies in all forms.

“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):

THIS STUDY IS NOW FULL

‘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.

 

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

“Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, I just don’t care what my thwarters think.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

When you have spent a bit of time in Ulysses–you wonder what Joyce might possibly have dreamed up next. I mean, after Molly, where could you possibly go? But after many years of hemming & hawing, sheming & shauning, I think it is hightides to swim in the Wake. So I have ordered my Wake Skeleton, my Book of the Dark, and the thing itself– and in we shall leap in September. Join me?

The plan for this six-week is Salon is NOT to read the whole shebang– but to START (one book group in Boston has been reading this for 18 YEARS, just for ex.). We will practice slow reading–and for this one, I want to pay attention to what the book requires of us: Five pages a week? One? And if we are fired up to connote, continue we will– six to nine week sessions at a time. The practice, as we developed it, had each reader  responsible for a section– approx. 20 lines– and they brought some insights as well as a reading of the section to our meeting.

There is an epic group of Wakians who, having travelled through with me before,  have planted the seeds, laid the rails– and some of those tumbling minstrels are likely to join this study– so we will have veterans. Though this will be my second time through, I lay no claim to expertise– but I have learned how to play in the Wake.

According to Margot Norris (whose introduction I am using as a buoy), it is not important to learn what the work is about. What it is about is the form itself–and the nature of indeterminacy that punctuates all of our communication and artistic renderings. As Joyce had started in Ulysses, the Wake continues to probe the looseness of identity. We don’t get to fix the characters– not even their names– but instead are offered shifting personas rendered through the prism of the dreaming mind, the quest for origins, the paradigms of myth and archetype, the fluidity of water…all this in a constant play of language: puzzles, riddles, puns, historical allusions re-imagined in language that tilts towards children’s rhymes. If you have a sense of playfulness and are ready to let loose and run, come along to the Anna Livia with us….

Just to get you started, the first line:

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

SALON DETAILS

• Ongoing study: first section  nine-weeks
• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• starts October 6th 2021, last meeting December 1st
•  Virtual Study
• Cost: £225 includes notes and resources
• Recommended edition: Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce,  Oxford University Press edition (June 2012); ISBN-13: 978-0199695157

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £225. 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. If you have not read any of James Joyce’s works previously, please contact us to discuss.

 

A few on-line resources:

On diving in: http://fractiousfiction.com/finnegans_wake.html

On editions: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1667467-editions-finnegans-editions

“Call me Ishmael. .  . .”

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, and the image of the one-legged 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, encyclopedic cataloguing, biblical oratory—and not a small dose of comedy. With Moby Dick, Melville presents an insightful study of obsession, madness and charismatic leadership that anticipates many of our contemporary conversations of democracy, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and environmentalism.

“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

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Salon Director
• Two Schedule options:  Thursday early afternoon 2-4 PM or later afternoon 5-7 PM
  
• Nine meeting study starting October 7th 2021 to December 16th. (No meetings 18 October, one other skipped week TBD)
• 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
• Virtual study using Zoom
• £220 for nine-meeting study includes opening notes and weekly preparatory notes

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TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £220. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration.

FOR THURSDAY 2-4 PM STUDY:

 

For THURSDAY 5-7 PM Study

2019 was the 200th year celebration of Herman Melville’s birth–making it a particularly auspicious moment to study this great work as this generated rich responses and re-considerations of this amazing work. Philip Hoare (mentioned below as one of the curators of the Moby Dick Big Read project) writes on the importance of this work in our contemporary moment in his article 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.”

A few years ago, 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 voices (Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry…) and art to illuminate each chapter…inspiring and inspired by this vast book.http://www.mobydickbigread.com

From the site:

‘I have written a wicked book’, said Melville when his novel was first published in 1851, ‘and I feel as spotless as the lamb’. Deeply subversive, in almost every way imaginable, Moby-Dick is a virtual, alternative bible – and as such, ripe for reinterpretation in this new world of new media. Out of Dominion was born its bastard child – or perhaps its immaculate conception – the Moby-Dick Big Read: an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.

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

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone;
she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

–Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf’s writing hits emotion first—‘what happens’ takes second place to ‘what feels’. The language is packed with subtlety, nuance and evocative images as Woolf probes the depths of intimate relationships. Come join us for this exploration of a warm June day in London: madness, aesthetics, the nature of love and intimacy, war, relationships across and between genders, Imperialism—all are prodded in this delicate and lyric work.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Sarah Snoxhall
• Five-meeting study starting October 11th running through Nov. 9th Monday early evenings; sessions last 1.5 hours
• Virtual Meeting on Zoom
• Cost £105 includes notes and critical resources 
• Recommended edition: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Oxford World’s Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0199536009

Please use the Paypal button below to register by paying £105 for the five-meeting study- if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer, please contact us for details. Upon payment, you will receive opening notes and further information. Please be sure the email associated with your payment is the same used for correspondence.

Mrs Dalloway makes an ideal study: her writing is challenging to read on one’s own, rich as it is in images, references and details that deliver a powerful emotional and intellectual impact. The study format encourages exploration by reading with a group of diverse and questing minds. Together we will work to understand Woolf’s incisive study of human personality—and use some of her contemporaries (Freud, Henri Bergson, Roger Fry) to help make sense of this new writing she creates. Here is Julia Briggs from her biographical study of Woolf through her works:

“Mrs. Dalloway is the story of a day in the lives of a man and woman who never meet—a society hostess who gives a party, and a shell-shocked soldier… What they have in common or why their stories are told in parallel, the reader must decide, for this is a modernist text, an open text, with no neat climax or final explanation, and what happens seems to shift as we read and reread. Woolf intended her experiment to bring the reader closer to everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainly, rejecting the artificial structures and categories of Victorian fiction.”

“The birds that live i’ th’ field

on the wild benefit of nature, live

Happier than we” (3.5., Duchess of Malfi)

What kind of animal is a human? This provocative question is at the heart of John Webster’s great English Renaissance tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Webster’s extraordinary play was first performed in 1614 at the Blackfriars Theatre by the company Shakespeare made famous—the King’s Men.

In a sensational, terror-driven drama of corruption, betrayal and murder, Webster probes the depth of human evil, even while he reveals the spirit of his age—one where melancholy, disillusionment and insecurity about humankind’s place in a swiftly changing cosmos were on the rise.

Can love and goodness survive a hornet’s nest of corruption? Join us in a study of The Duchess of Malfi to find out!

 

Who was John Webster?

John Webster (c.1578–c.1632) and William Shakespeare almost certainly met when Webster was a young man. The great Shakespeare was about 15 years his senior and Webster a bourgeoning playwright in the early years of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare may even have acted in a play on which Webster worked as a journeyman—John Marston’s The Malcontent. Though Shakespeare was slowly retiring from the theatre, his inspiration was long-lasting. Shakespeare’s influence on Webster is everywhere apparent in Webster’s great tragedies, but the Bard’s young colleague and successor is not a mere imitator. His matchless imagination and powerful command of English, in verse and prose, place him in his own right as one of the Jacobean age’s greatest playwrights. (Adapted from Shakespeare & Co, Stanley Wells, Penguin, 2006).

Salon details:

• Facilitated by Julie Sutherland
• Monday evenings, 6­–8 pm
• Seven-meeting study, 1 November to 13 December 2021
• Suggested Edition: The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. René Weis (ISBN-10: 9780199539284 | ISBN-13: 978-0199539284). N.B. Available from amazon.uk and bookdepository.com (the latter offers free worldwide shipping and no duty).
• £165 for seven-week study; includes preparatory notes and questions.

TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £165. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.

 

 

“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.

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“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…

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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

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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

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