Now more than ever it seems right to read Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita (1955). The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamophosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-World War II superpower that was late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six-meeting study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• 23 April – 28 May 2026
• Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time)
• £240 for six two-hour meetings
• Recommended edition The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000): ISBN: 978-0141185040

“I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”

Jane Eyre is a profoundly important novel. It is a stalwart of feminist literature, a challenge to social hierarchy and arguably instigated the ‘inward turn’ in narrative fiction, where psychological factors became just as significant as events in the active world. From the beginning of the narrative, Jane is an interior being, brimming with anger and an acute sense of injustice. As she navigates her neglectful family, abusive school and unnerving first job as a governess, she is challenged to remain true to her convictions and follow through with what she believes. 

In our discussions we’ll cover our personal responses to Jane’s plight. What does Brontë mean by presenting these challenges to the reader, and what do we make of them? Furthermore, we might think of how characters such as Adele, Bertha Mason and Mrs Fairfax elaborate on these challenges. Issues we may dwell on include: social injustice, the lives of children, postcolonial perspectives, feminist perspectives, psychology, and notions of space and landscape. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz
• Tuesdays, 19, 26 May & 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 June & 7 July 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Recommended edition: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780141441146
• £320.00 for eight two-hour meetings

‘It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. But I remember with some distinctness that eerie spell which seemed to bind the two of us as we stood together in the coming darkness looking towards that shape further down the bank.’

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel is a haunting study of memory and loss set in post-war Nagasaki and 1980s England.

The author was born in Nagasaki and his mother was a survivor of the nuclear bomb. But he left Japan aged five and grew up in England, not even visiting the country of his birth until well into adult life. In his Nobel Prize speech, Ishiguro said that with hindsight, writing this novel was an attempt to get down in writing his ‘personal Japan’, a ‘Japan of the mind’, before losing it forever.

In Ishiguro’s post-war Nagasaki, still under US occupation, people feel a mix of hope for the future (Japan’s so-called ‘new dawn’), unease and dread concerning the lingering effects of the bomb, and bitter resentment towards the previous generation that led them to war. For young wife Etsuko, these feelings are concentrated into her concerns about motherhood and the future of her unborn child. But how does this play out in her memory decades later, following that child’s suicide?

Written in his mid-twenties, this astonishingly mature and accomplished first novel includes themes which would resonate throughout Ishiguro’s later work, such as the conflict between generations, regret in later life for earlier choices, self-deception and the distortions of memory.

Like Ishiguro’s other novels, A Pale View of Hills deals with how we overcome loss, how we make sense of the past through recollection, and how we construct our present selves through the way we remember our past.

Following the recent film version, which takes a very Japanese perspective and necessarily simplifies some elements, now is the perfect time to revisit Ishiguro’s original text and its enduring mysteries and ambiguities. Every return to this novel reveals further rich layers of meaning, emotion and interpretation, which we will uncover through a series of slow and careful readings.

JOINING DETAILS:

As the first epic Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf holds a unique place in the history of English literature. Set in the warrior societies of dark age Denmark and Sweden, it tells of the hero Beowulf and his three victorious fights with the monstrous creature Grendel, with Grendel’s ferocious, vengeful mother, and with a venomous, fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding dragon.

Every translation of a work of literature is a new interpretation of the original and there have been many versions down the centuries. In this LitSalon Short, Tim Swinglehurst will discuss some of the more recent traditional translations of Beowulf and compare them to the acclaimed 2021 ‘feminist’ version translated by celebrated author and editor Maria Dahvana Headley, which focuses on themes of toxic masculinity, power dynamics and warrior-bonding while, in the words of Professor Carolyne Larrington, allowing “space for the poem’s women to stretch and breathe”. 

Tim will also explain why he has chosen this translation, described by The New Yorker as “a Beowulf for our moment” as the focus for a four-week study of Beowulf he will lead from 2-23 July 2026 (full details can be found here).

JOINING DETAILS:

• A one and a quarter hour LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• LitSalon Shorts are offered free of charge but places must be pre-booked using the form below.

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.  Recommended edition: Norton Critical Fourth Edition (published in 2016, this is preferable to the third edition) ISBN: 978-0-393-64050-2.
• 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.

Since its first appearance in print in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has enchanted generations of children with the tale of a little girl who follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole, to discover a bizarre and fantastical world occupied by equally outlandish and unsettling characters such as the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the formidable Queen of Hearts.

In this LitSalon Short we will consider why the book (and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass) have such enduring appeal to both adults and children. How many interpretations are possible and what were the intentions of its author Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics don? What do we bring to the book as readers, often remembering it from our childhood experience of the text and illustrations portraying a strange and sometimes surreal alternative reality?

For anyone wanting to dig deeper, Tim will be leading a four meeting study of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland starting in August.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting LitSalon Short, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst
• Thursday 25 June, 6.00-7.15 pm (UK time)
• Free of charge (but please book your place using the form below)

The first major poem in English literature, Beowulf was composed between the eighth and eleventh centuries in a language which few English speakers understand today. Set in the warrior societies of dark age Denmark and Sweden, it tells of the hero Beowulf and his three victorious fights with the monstrous creature Grendel, with Grendel’s ferocious, vengeful mother, and with a venomous, fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding dragon. It is also, in the words of celebrated author and editor Maria Dahvana Headley, a recent translator of the poem, “a dazzling, furious, funny, vicious, desperate, hungry, beautiful, mutinous, maudlin, supernatural, rapturous shout”.

We will be reading Beowulf in Headley’s acclaimed, radical, ‘feminist’ version – “brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating” as The New Yorker describes it. It’s “a Beowulf for our moment”, focusing on themes of toxic masculinity, power dynamics and warrior-bonding while, in the words of Professor Carolyne Larrington, allowing “space for the poem’s women to stretch and breathe”. 

Headley declares that the lines in her translation are “structured for speaking, and for speaking in contemporary rhythms” and she maintains the alliterative and rhythmic drive of the original. This is a translation which demands to be read aloud and to be heard attentively, and this study will provide an opportunity so to honour both poem and translation.

Every translation is a new interpretation of the original, Headley’s more brashly and explicitly than most. As we read, we will also keep one eye on more traditional translations (and from time to time scrutinise the original Old English) to try to discern other themes and ideas haunting the world of Beowulf.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Thursday 2, 9, 16 & 23 July 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• We will read the translation by Maria Dahvana Headley, published by Scribe UK, ISBN: ‎ 978-1911617822
• £140.00 for four meetings.

‘I think of how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.’

Austerlitz

‘His art is a form of justice’

Rachel Cusk

The last book by the great German writer W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001), tells the story of one individual’s twentieth century trauma through the repression and return of his memory and belated investigations into his origins.

‘Jacques Austerlitz’ is a Kindertransport survivor who spent most of his adult life avoiding any knowledge of the Third Reich, including his own involvement and his family’s fate. When memory returns, the effect is shattering and seismic. At once a study of a traumatised consciousness at the limit, and a new way of apprehending (and beginning to understand) the degenerate history of the twentieth century.

This may seem like more than enough to be going on with, but as a literary work Austerlitz is so much more. With no chapters, few paragraphs, and dotted throughout with ambiguous photographs, this doesn’t look much like an ordinary novel. And indeed it partakes of many other genres, including memoir, travelogue, philosophy, history . . . Long passages are devoted to architectural history, birds, the nature of time, early aviation and religion in Wales, topics which may or may not relate to the central themes of the book.

And as in all Sebald’s prose narratives, there is the mysterious narrator, someone who both is and is not the author, who listens with respect and empathy to Austerlitz’s story, meeting him by chance over several decades, and who adds his own documentations and investigations to the story. The result is a book that is beautifully written, revelatory and ultimately almost unbearably moving.

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

• What does this novel tell us about the nature of memory itself?
• What are the ethical and moral quandaries faced by both writer and reader of this book?
• How do Sebald’s unique style and technique – at once archaic and postmodern, German and English – enhance our appreciation and understanding of the narrative?
• What connects the author-narrator to his traumatized subject?
• What role do the enigmatic, caption-less photographs and images play in the text?
• What is the background to the writing of this book, and its inspiration (much has been discovered since the author’s death)?

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Lewis Ward
• Wednesday 8 July – 26 August, 7.00-9.00 pm
• £280.00 for eight two-hour meetings
• Recommended edition: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, Penguin, ISBN: 9780241951804

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

Published in 1930, As I Lay Dying uses thirteen narrators to explore the many voices found in a Southern family and community. Addie Bundren, the wife and mother to a poor white farm family, is on her deathbed. As her last wish, she requests that her husband bury her among her family in the town of Jefferson. And so, upon her death, her family – for the most part begrudgingly – follows through with her wish. We hear from everyone involved in the journey, including Addie from the grave—a testament to Faulkner’s creation of an environment so believable that such outrageousness is allowed. The humour is dark. You might not expect to laugh at the image of a dead women’s corpse falling from a casket into a river, but you will.

Faulkner uses multiple narratives, each with his or her own interests and biases, to create a puzzle that readers could piece together from the ‘true’ circumstances of the story. The conclusion presents a key to understanding the background to the central event in a way that traditional linear narratives simply cannot accomplish. With that said, in As I Lay Dying all of the narrators are believable, even Addie who is dead when we hear from her.

The most brilliant aspect of this novel is how Faulkner carefully weaves fragments and pieces from the many narrative voices to create a rich tapestry of often conflicting and competing perspectives.

For more information about our study series Faulkner & His Children, please read our blog post here.

JOINING DETAILS:

• This, our first Faulkner & His Children study, will be a Salon Intensive taking place over three consecutive days, led by John Allemand and Toby Brothers.
• Three meetings on Zoom: Friday 17, Saturday 18 July & Sunday 19 July 2026, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time).
• Recommended edition: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Norton Critical Edition (Second Edition, August 2022), ISBN:9780393614534.
• £210 for three-day study.

“The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.  Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry.  But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.”

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Among the masterpieces of early twentieth-century European literature, Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice stands as one of the most subtle and unsettling meditations on beauty, art and moral disintegration.

At first glance the story appears straightforward: ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice seeking rest and renewal, only to become increasingly obsessed with the beauty of a young Polish boy, Tadzio. Yet, beneath this deceptively simple narrative lies an extraordinarily complex structure of mythological allusion, stylistic irony and philosophical reflection. Mann uses this sophisticated architecture to explore interwoven questions about the relationship between beauty and corruption, the conflict between artistic discipline and erotic fascination, and the danger inherent in the aesthetic idealization of youth.

This three-part study will approach Death in Venice through careful reading, examining the intricate ways Mann constructs meaning through language, narrative perspective and symbolic patterning. The narrator’s voice remains elegant, composed and almost ceremonially dignified, even as the increasingly troubling reality of Aschenbach’s behaviours becomes apparent and his psychological state deteriorates. This contrast generates a quiet but devastating irony which is essential to any reading of the text. 

Central to Mann’s method is what later critics, borrowing a phrase associated with modernist literary practice, have called the ‘mythic method’. Rather than recounting myth directly, Mann embeds classical mythological structures within the psychological narrative, transforming his tale into a mythic drama of descent.

Classical motifs (Mann’s ‘new classicism’—ironic, reflective, self-conscious) function as mythic signals guiding the reader beneath the surface of the narrative as the central character becomes a figure moving within an invisible mythological framework, his personal crisis repeating patterns drawn from antiquity. As the language of classicism slowly gives way to a dreamlike atmosphere of decay, Tadzio becomes less a character than a symbolic embodiment of ideal beauty itself.

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Following our three-session literary study, we will turn to Luchino Visconti’s acclaimed 1971 film adaptation and examine the dynamic relationship between literature and film. Celebrated as one of the most visually striking adaptations of a modernist text, Visconti transforms Mann’s dense verbal narrative into a rich visual meditation on art, desire and mortality. In two additional sessions we will consider how Visconti reinterprets Mann’s work through cinema: how emphasis is shifted from literary interiority to visual atmosphere, how music—particularly the use of Mahler—reshapes the emotional structure of the story, and how the film’s imagery elaborates Mann’s themes of beauty, decadence and decline.

What happens when a story built on interior reflection and ironic narration is translated into images, gestures and sound? Which elements of Mann’s mythic structure survive the transition to cinema, and which are transformed or displaced? Where the novella relies on language and narrative irony, the film must communicate through composition, colour and rhythm.

Together, the elements of this study will allow us to observe a remarkable dialogue between two artistic forms.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five two-and-a-half hour meetings, live on Zoom, led by John Allemand
• Mondays, 6.00-8.30 pm (UK time), 3, 10, 17, 24 & 31 August 2026
• Recommended edition: Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim, introduction by Michael Cunningham, Harper Collins Ecco, ISBN: ‎ 978-0060576172
• Luchino Visconti, Death in Venice (1971), is available on most streaming services (including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, You Tube TV, Hulu) and we also recommend Criterion Collection’s digitally remastered print of 2019.  We will show selected film clips during the study sessions, but participants are asked to watch the film closely in advance.
• £225.00 for twelve-and-a-half hour study over five meetings, to include background notes and resources.

“There is no looking glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?“

These words, spoken by Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, depict a woman who has been split into two parts. One (‘a girl’ or ‘child’) she knows, the other is an unknown self who is trapped by the memory of the other. That she should feel this way is quite understandable in light of her circumstances. Although she was born in the West Indies, she now lives at Thornfield Hall in England, and despite her real name being Antionette, her husband has christened her ‘Bertha Mason’ and labelled her mad.

Wide Sargasso Sea extends and deepens the literary classic Jane Eyre by providing a backstory for the mysterious character of Bertha Mason. While Charlotte Bronte left Bertha’s feelings an unknown entity, Rhys places them right at the heart of a narrative that explores racism and colonialism alongside the themes of feminism and personal autonomy. 

Participants do not have to have read Jane Eyre to understand Wide Sargasso Sea, but a decent knowledge of the former would be useful. People may wish to use this as an extension to one of the Jane Eyre studies or as a stand-alone study of a mid-20th century classic. Much as it’s tempting to use the novel to read ‘back’ to the 19^th century of Bronte’s text, we can also discuss what this text reveals about the culture of the 1960s. We might also consider this in relation to the fall of Empire and the cultural aftermath of that political project. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz
• Tuesday 11, 18, 25 August & 1, 8 September 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Recommended edition: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141182858
• £200 for five two-hour meetings

“Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole – they see all sorts of things – they see themselves . . .”

Jacob’s Room is widely regarded as Woolf’s first modernist novel, though it’s sometimes overlooked by even the most ardent of her readers. This is a travesty when we consider that the work is such a deft discussion of grief, life writing, and the role of modern fiction. It prefigures the literary playfulness of Orlando while retaining the depth she exhibits inTo the Lighthouse and The Waves. 

Jacob’s Room concerns the life of Jacob Flanders, a talented but unheroic young man who hunts butterflies as a boy, goes on to study at Cambridge, and then finally settles in London. His biography is roughly based on that of Woolf’s brother, Thoby Stephen, but in many ways his life could be anyone’s. As the quotation above implies, we see ourselves in a person like Jacob even though (or perhaps because) we only catch glimpses of him. 

Questions raised by this novel include:

• How does Woolf intervene in the classic hero’s narrative, and what does her reinvention of this trope say about masculinity and success?
• How does Woolf undermine traditional literary form? Keeping in mind that this is her first modernist novel, we might ask how she subverts conventional structures and eludes our expectations. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Karina Jakubowicz
• Wednesdays, 12, 19, 26 August & 2, 9 September 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK)
• Recommended edition: Jacob’s Room, Vintage Classics, ISBN: 978-1784877958
• £200 for five two-hour meetings

Since its first appearance in print in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has enchanted generations of children with the tale of a little girl who follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole, to discover a bizarre and fantastical world occupied by equally outlandish and unsettling characters such as the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the formidable Queen of Hearts.

Alice is not just for children, adults have read and reread the book, each time uncovering for themselves new layers of meaning: social, political, cultural, metaphysical and, perhaps most frequently, psychoanalytical. For some Alice is a story about growing up, negotiating the complex rules and disturbing unpredictability which seem to govern the adult world (“How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons!” thought Alice); for others it’s a story about revealing identity, the struggle in life to define oneself (“I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think that I must have changed several times since then”). Some see it as a challenge to find solutions to language games and the logic of nonsense, problems set by Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don in mathematics (“Sentence first – verdict afterwards” says the Queen at the trial which concludes the book); while others believe the many surreal, even hallucinatory aspects of the story suggest the disorientating effect of drug use (“What a curious feeling!” said Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope!”).

With such a wide range of interpretation, participants will be invited to bring their own interests and areas of expertise to the study, where we can create together a kaleidoscope of meaning. “Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” says the White Queen in Wonderland’s sequel Through the Looking Glass. We will try to combine six (or even more) seemingly contradictory interpretations and seek to provide some sort of meaning, even if that remains elusive and ultimately unstable. Be reassured: no rabbit hole will be too small for us to leave unexplored.

Many readers have clear pictures of the Alice story in their minds, perhaps because of the illustrations which usually accompany the story (“What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation,” muses Alice before her Adventures begin). John Tenniel’s original illustrations remain definitive, but many other artists – including Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake, Salvador Dali, Tove Jansson and Chris Riddell – have also illustrated the text. We will try to take time to look closely at some of Tenniel’s illustrations, and participants will be invited to share their own favourite pictures and other creative works inspired by Alice’s Adventures, in film or music or video game, in fashion or in food.

Please note, in this study there will be opportunities for participants to assume some of Carroll’s larger-than-life characters when those who wish to do so may read selected passages from the book aloud.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst
• Thursdays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 13, 20, 27 August & 3 September 2026
• £140.00 for four meetings, including background notes and resources
• Recommended edition:  Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 4th Norton Critical Edition, edited by Donald J. Gray, 2024. ISBN: 9781324059608. This edition also includes Alice Through the Looking-Glass, Tenniel’s illustrations and critical essays.
• Tim is also offering a LitSalon Short on Alice in Wonderland on 25 June.

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REDUCED COSTS:  We are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We can’t promise to help but please email us if you would like to be considered for a reduced-fee place (your details will be treated as confidential).

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.

Now more than ever it seems right to read Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita (1955). The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamophosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-World War II superpower that was late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six-meeting study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• 17 September – 22 October 2026
• Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time)
• £240 for six two-hour meetings
• Recommended edition The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000): ISBN: 978-0141185040

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.

“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

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the mountains of Modernism. This is my eighth tour through the Search and 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 groups who have made it through the first two volumes in the last six months are lively and welcoming and we have room for two or three more to join us. 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.”

While another observes: “I feel really privileged to be gaining a better understanding of Proust’s amazing work and be able to enjoy the intricacies of his language and thoughts . . . the meetings allow plenty of time and space for exploration and our study is reinforced by emails and relevant essays in between meetings. I am very grateful to have this opportunity to join the study.”

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:

• It may be possible for new members to join this group of readers. If you are interested please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject heading: ‘Joining Proust Group’.
• Facilitated by Toby Brothers
• Wednesdays, 3.00-5.00 pm (UK time) 
• Thirteen meeting study: 7 October – 9 December 2026, resuming from 13 January – 3 February 2027, N.B. these dates cover 14 weeks allowing one ‘spare’ week for use in case of illness.
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright)  ISBN-13: 978-0099362418
• £455 for thirteen meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.