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Greek tragedy has a timeless quality. As Virginia Woolf writes in her essay On Not Knowing Greek, ‘the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there. . . . In the Electra or the Antigone we are impressed . . . by heroism itself, by fidelity itself.’

Revenge, betrayal, lust, murder— but also courage, compassion, honour: Sophocles shows the heights and depths of human emotion. We are moved today by the tension between reason and emotion, fate and free will, law and individual conscience, just as people were in classical Athens.

This LitSalon study will go deep into the world of Sophocles as we read Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus.  And we will explore the philosophy of tragedy with Aristotle’s Poetics and A. C. Bradley’s essay Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Seven meeting live online study led by Sean Forester
• Sundays, 17 May – 28 June 2026, 4.00-6.00 pm (UK time)

  • 17  May –   Oedipus Rex
  • 24  May –   Oedipus, Aristotle’s Poetics
  • 31  May –   Antigone   
  • 7  June. –   Antigone, Hegel on Tragedy   
  • 14 June –   Philoctetes 
  • 21 June –   Oedipus at Colonus
  • 28 June –   Oedipus at Colonus, Tragic Painting and Sculpture

• £245 for seven meeting study on Zoom

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

“What do I know?”

This question lies at the heart of Montaigne’s Essays, a work that, from its first publication in 1580, has challenged our relationship with knowledge. For one thing, instead of pontificating or lecturing on anything, Montaigne’s Essays propose that we “try out” (“essayer”) everything.

At almost 1,000 pages, the Essays are filled with a variety of personal experiences mixed with passages that are sometimes serious and profound, sometimes funny and very personal, some are very moving, and some utterly contradict things that he has said before! It is no surprise that Montaigne has influenced a host of thinkers, readers and writers as varied as Shakespeare, Pascal, Thoreau, Virginia Woolf and Proust (to name just a few).

In this study we invite readers to join in a conversation spanning the centuries by exploring together two of Montaigne’s most famous essays: On Cannibals and On Experience.

A little taste of his writing that might get us close to him, or maybe, as Pascal would say, close to ourselves:

“It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything that I see there”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Three meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Vivien Kogut and Emilia Steuerman
• Tuesdays 5:30-7:30pm (UK time), 16, 23 and 30 June 2026
• £120.00 for three two-hour meetings

In May 2026 The Arden Shakespeare, widely regarded as setting the ‘gold standard’ for scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, will publish the first volumes of its new Fourth Series. These new editions will offer fresh insights into Shakespeare’s extraordinary output to new generations of readers, students and performers, as well as to those who are already familiar with his works.

We are delighted that Dr José Perez Diez, Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama in the School of English at the University of Leeds, who is editing the new edition of King John, has accepted our invitation to deliver a lecture on the art and craft of editing Shakespeare’s works and how this can enhance our own appreciation and understanding of his words and ideas.

Following the lecture there will be a panel discussion, chaired by London Literary Salon facilitator Tim Swinglehurst, with colleagues Julie Sutherland and Jane Wymark, chaired by Tim Swinglehurst with opportunities for questions and comments from participants to gain greater insight into the process, challenges and rewards of attentive editing and reading.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER:

Dr José A. Pérez Díez is Associate Professor of Early Modern Drama in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He currently serves as the Joint Chair of the British Shakespeare Association, and is a General Editor of The Revels Plays and the Associate Editor of the Oxford Complete Works of John Marston. He is editing the King John volume for the new Arden Shakespeare series.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Wednesday 17 June 2026, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), live on Zoom
• Lecture by Dr José Pérez Díez lasting approximately 55 minutes, followed by panel discussion chaired by Tim Swinglehurst, with Jane Wymark and Dr Julie Sutherland and questions and comments from participants.
• £25.00 for two-hour live online event

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.

William Blake expressed his radical vision through illuminated books that combine poetry and art. We’ll study selections from some of his powerful early poems: Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Auguries of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. While Blake’s poetry stands on its own and requires no background knowledge, encountering him is especially interesting after reading Dante or Milton. So, this study would be a fine next chapter for those who have previously studied Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy with the LitSalon. You can view some of Blake’s art and poetry here.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Five meeting study led by Sean Forester
• Mondays, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (UK time), 22, 29 June and 6,13, 20 July
• Please purchase facsimile editions of Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with Blake’s illuminated manuscripts in full colour. The texts are also available free online at the Blake Archive.
• £200 for five two-hour meetings

This is the twelfth in a series of single session studies on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Participants are welcome to join as few or many sessions as they please.

For centuries, critics have debated the identity of Shakespeare’s poetic rival, depicted in the sonnets as a celebrated writer competing for the equally mysterious Fair Youth’s patronage and affection. Leading candidates include Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Edmund Spenser, though he may represent a composite of rivals. He vanishes from the sonnets as abruptly as he appears. In this twelfth standalone session, we’ll examine two of the nine “rival poet” sonnets alongside an earlier sonnet addressed directly to the beloved.  

The sonnets have always inspired, fascinated and disturbed readers. Are these lyric expressions of tortured love – among other themes – the key to understanding the mysterious life of Shakespeare, or are they not autobiographical at all?

Through close analysis and hands-on interpretive work, we will examine Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic exploration of his speaker’s romantic and tortured feelings and experiences.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single two-hour meeting led by Dr Julie Sutherland on Zoom
• Wednesday 24 June 2026, 5.00 – 7.00 pm (BST)
• Session #12 – Sonnets 79, 86 and 87
• £30.00 for two-hour study

We are offering these self-contained, individual studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a workshop style setting. Over time we will cover a broad selection of the 154 sonnets that comprise Shakespeare’s celebrated sequence. Participants are invited to join as few or many sessions as they please.

Before the session, Julie Sutherland will send links to online versions or attach specific copies for discussion. It is highly recommended that you print these off before joining this hands-on session. If you have a printed edition, please also have it ready so we can consider variations between texts. Have a notebook and pencil on hand as well!

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

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.

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

An invitation to writers of all levels (beginners are as welcome as the more experienced) — to loosen the ligaments, put perfection aside, and write for the quiet joy of discovery; to share a space where words unfold boldly, imperfectly, and in response to curiosity.

Rooted in the ethos of the London Literary Salon — where close reading and conversation open pathways to deeper understanding — this writing series, facilitated by Alison Cable, extends the same spirit of inquiry into creative practice. An invitation to explore writing as a way of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

Each block of three months offers a gentle rhythm of practice: a facilitated Anchor Session followed later in the month by a companion Open Writing Session, where you can return to your work, deepen the ideas sparked in the workshop, and write alongside others in quiet company.

How it works

• Anchor Session (first Tuesday of each month, 5.00-7.00 pm, UK time):
  A guided workshop exploring a theme, text, or prompt through discussion, short exercises and optional sharing. These sessions provide inspiration and direction for your writing practice.
• Open Writing Session (third Tuesday of each month, 5:00–6:30 pm, UK time):
  A lightly held, communal writing space in which you can develop your ideas, try new forms, or simply write in the company of others. Optional check-in and sharing at the end.
• Block Pass: £105 for three months (includes three Anchor Sessions and three companion Open Writing Sessions). This block encourages continuity and engagement, with sessions scheduled monthly to help you build a routine.
• Single Sessions: please enquire.

Block 1: January – March 2026

1. Anchor: 6 January | 3 February | 3 March
2. Open: 20 January | 17 February | 17 March

Block 2: April – June 2026

• Anchor: 7 April | 5 May | 2 June
• Open: 28 April | 19 May | 23 June

Block 3: July – September 2026

• Anchor: 7 July | 4 August | 1 September
• Open: 21 July | 18 August | 15 September

Block 4: October – December 2026

• Open: 20 October | 17 November | 22 December
• Anchor: 6 October | 3 November | 1 December

‘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

Step into the vast cosmos of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in this immersive eight-week study. More than a poem, Milton’s epic is a world unto itself, one with vaulted heavens, smouldering hells and a fragile Eden. It presents a realm where every choice tips the balance of creation. This study invites curious minds to lose themselves in the epic’s grandeur and wrestle with the questions it refuses to let go: what does it mean to rebel? To obey? To be free? To fall?

Over eight two-and-a-half-hour sessions, we will traverse all twelve books of Paradise Lost, tracing Milton’s visions of angels in revolt, serpentine deceits, and humankind on the brink of catastrophe. Each week, close reading of key passages will spark lively conversation about the poem’s grand themes: freedom and fate, temptation and grace, the allure of evil, and the possibility of redemption. Along the way, we shall uncover the thunderous music and daring invention that defines Milton’s verse.

This study is as much about experience as analysis. Reading this great work aloud will enable us to feel the powerful rhythm, sharpen our thinking in the heat of dialogue, and discover together how a 17th-century poet still speaks to us with urgent clarity. Participants will not just read Paradise Lost. They will inhabit it, wrestle with it, and carry its fire forward.

Whether you come for epic storytelling, moral philosophy, or the sheer intoxication of language, this study promises a journey that is as challenging as it is exhilarating. Experience or rediscover Milton’s masterpiece and join us as we explore what it means to “awake, arise or be for ever fall’n.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-week study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Julie Sutherland
• Eight two-and-a-half-hour meetings, Tuesdays, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)
• 14 July – 1 September 2026
• £320 for eight meetings and background notes and resources
• We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

“. . . Unclean . . . spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents — a poisonous book . . . ”

Anonymous review, London Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890

“Dull and nasty . . . stupid and vulgar . . . immoral. It may be suggested that Wilde derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting.”  

Samuel Henry Jeyes, The St. James Gazette, 24 June 1890

“The poor public, hearing from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas, they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. ”   

Oscar Wilde, from his response to the St. James Gazette review, 25 June 1890

Joseph Marshall Stoddart, Oscar Wilde’s editor in the Philadelphia offices of Lippincott’s Magazine, was neither a bumpkin nor a prude: in 1882 he arranged for Wilde to visit Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, during his American visit. But, alarmed by material he feared readers would find “offensive”, and unbeknownst to its author until after publication, Stoddart went through Wilde’s original manuscript, pencil in hand, crossing out some 500 words to render it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”

In short, the novel that Wilde’s irate fin de siècle reviewers deemed filth was already a bowdlerised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The contemporary reader, fresh from watching the latest episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, may struggle to understand the fury that The Picture of Dorian Gray unleashed in the 1890s. Or the stench it carried for decades after, having starred as Exhibit A in Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency”.

One hundred and thirty-six years on, The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks to our moment with uncanny precision.

Dorian Gray’s portrait — polished, static, forever young while its subject rots — anticipates the curated profile picture, the Zoom filter, the gap between the life performed online and the life actually lived. In an era of Botox and doom scrolling, instant gratification and weekly scandal, Wilde’s central question feels less like Victorian Gothic and more like Monday morning: what are we willing to sacrifice — integrity, authenticity, other people — to keep the image intact?

Wilde knew, long before Instagram did, that the real corruption isn’t the sins you commit; it’s the lengths you’ll go to make sure nobody sees them.

This study will use, as its basic text, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, published by the Harvard University Press (2012).

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein
• Tuesdays, 8.00-10.00 (UK time), 14 July – 4 August
• HIGHLY recommended edition: The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray: A Reader’s Edition ISBN: 9780674066311
• £160.00 for four two-hour meetings

Please note that although this study is fully booked, we are currently keeping a waiting list and may be able to offer a second study if there is sufficient demand. Please email us if you would like to be included on the waiting list.

Join Julie Sutherland to explore the moral complexity, political intrigue and dark humour of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in this eight-week full-text study. Often called a ‘problem play’, it resists easy categorisation: not a traditional comedy or tragedy, it confronts audiences with the messy realities of justice, sexual morality, corruption and the abuse of power.

In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio temporarily relinquishes power to the strict and seemingly righteous Angelo, who enforces Vienna’s laws with alarming severity. As the city grapples with corruption and sexual coercion, the characters—most notably the virtuous Isabella—navigate dilemmas of conscience, mercy and authority. Shakespeare exposes the tension between law and morality, highlighting the dangers of judging others when those in power are themselves deeply flawed.

Throughout the play, Shakespeare blends moments of comedy with unsettling moral questions, creating a world that is both vividly real and painfully ironic. Biblical themes of judgment and mercy echo throughout, challenging audiences to consider the balance between justice and forgiveness, while the looming, imperfect marriages at the play’s conclusion underscore the uncertainty of human happiness.

Over the course of eight meetings, we will read the entire play aloud, examining its rich language and provocative themes to gain a deep understanding of Shakespeare’s artistry. At the same time we will revel in the ways Measure for Measure reflects both the Elizabethan world and issues that remain startlingly modern.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight-meeting study live on Zoom led by Julie Sutherland
• Wednesdays, 5.00-7.00 pm BST, 15 July – 2 September 2026
• Recommended edition: Measure for Measure, The New Oxford Shakespeare, ISBN 13: 978-0192865861
• £280 for eight two-hour meetings

“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.

JOIN US FOR THIS UNIQUE LIVE PERFORMANCE – USE EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT CODE LLS15 WHEN CHECKING OUT YOUR BOOKING!

To coincide with the cinema release of Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey, we have joined with London-based Theatro Technis to bring key passages from Homer’s magnificent epic to life.  

Salon founder Toby Brothers (who, over the last 25 years has shared The Odyssey with readers aged from 9 to 90) and actor and facilitator of many Salon studies Jane Wymark will present live readings of some of Homer’s most brilliant and compelling verses to tell the tale of the Greek warrior’s ten-year journey home to Ithaca, his perilous encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens and Circe, and ultimate reunion with his wife and son.  

After a short interval, audience members will be invited to join a Q&A session exploring why this extraordinary story of adventure and romance, written nearly three thousand years ago, remains relevant today.

HOW TO BOOK:

• The Odyssey Live! at Theatro Technis, Camden, London NW1, Sunday 19 July 2026, 3.00-5.00 pm
• Tickets are available from the theatre box office £20.00 (£15.00 concessions)
• Earlybird tickets can be purchased for £15.00 until 30 June, use code LLS15 when booking (add discount code at final stage of checkout).

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness . . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

When The Great Gatsby was first published in April 1925, it was a commercial and critical failure. Fitzgerald’s contemporaries — T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein — wrote to him in admiration, but the wider public was unmoved. The novel had sold only 25,000 copies by the time of Fitzgerald’s death fifteen years later, aged 44, his heart giving out after years of heavy drinking.

The novel’s resurrection came from an unlikely source. During the Second World War, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed over 150,000 Armed Services Editions to soldiers — and Gatsby found its audience in the trenches. Then, in 1945, the critic Lionel Trilling declared Jay Gatsby a symbol of the American Dream itself, an act of critical elevation that lifted the novel into the North American literary canon, where it has remained ever since, its status as a ‘classic’ further cemented by adoption into high school and college curricula in the 1950s and 60s.

What a difference 100 years can make. The Great Gatsby has now sold 30 million copies worldwide, spawned six feature films, and — in the last two years alone — inspired two major Broadway and West End musical productions. ‘The Jazz Age’, a term Fitzgerald himself coined, has passed permanently into the global imagination.

And yet this novel set in the aftermath of the First World War — that brief, feverish interval of new money, loose morals, and borrowed time — feels less like history and more like a mirror. Jay Gatsby is one of literature’s great early architects of the curated public image: a man who reinvented himself from scratch, surrounded that invention with spectacle, and bet everything on a single, doomed idea of who he needed to be. In our current era of personal branding, social media performance, and the relentless pressure to project a life rather than to live one, this predicament is instantly recognisable.

So too is the world Gatsby inhabits: the careless elites of East Egg, the strivers of West Egg, the vast exhausted majority watching from the ash heaps in between. Fitzgerald’s anatomy of class anxiety, performative wealth and the violence that hides behind good manners resonates with particular force at a moment of historic wealth transfer, rising populism and deepening questions about who the American Dream was ever really for.

Fitzgerald knew, a century before the term existed, that ‘hustle culture’ is a trap. Real corruption isn’t just wanting more, it’s the moment you decide that wanting justifies everything else.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers & Nancy Goldstein
• Wednesdays, 5.00–7.00 pm (UK time), 29 July – 19 August 2026
• Recommended edition: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzerald, Penguin Modern Classics, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0141182636
• £160.00 for four two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a 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.

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
• Fridays, 6.00-8.30 pm (UK time), 31 July, 7, 14, 21 & 28 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.

At this difficult time in the world, it can be salutary to confront the darker aspects of human nature through literature and experience the catharsis of Greek tragedy. In this spirit we are offering a study on two of Euripides’ greatest plays: Trojan Women and The Bacchae. Trojan Women shows the horrors of war, while The Bacchae confronts us with the Dionysian madness highlighted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. 

It is fascinating to see how tragic drama developed from Aeschylus and Sophocles through the pivotal figure of Euripides, who set the stage for later masters of the genre such as Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. The LitSalon is exploring this through a series of studies. Please join us for this encounter with Euripides. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study, led by Sean Forester live on Zoom
• Sundays, 4.30 – 6.30 pm (UK time), 26 July & 2, 9, 16 August
• Recommended edition: you may use any translation you prefer providing it has line numbers clearly marked. One good option is: The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics), Mary Lefkowitz (Editor), James Romm (Editor).
• £160 for four two-hour meetings

“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.

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.

In this study we’ll read selected passages from Homer and look at the great visual artworks they have inspired. Then we will discuss Christopher Nolan’s recently released Odyssey film (opening in the US and UK in July).

The episodes we will consider are: The Sirens, Circe, Polyphemus, and Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey; and from The Iliad the death of Hector and the scene between Priam and Achilles. Here is a preview of the visual art we will discuss.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Sean Forester
• Tuesdays 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 11, 18, 25 August & 1 September 2026 
• You may use any translation of The Iliad and Odyssey you prefer. 
• £160 for four two-hour meetings