LITERATURE COURSES
Literature Cambridge Ltd is an independent educational organisation providing top-quality courses on the best of Classical literature and literature in English.
Our courses are taught by leading academics and are open to all.
Email us: info@literaturecambridge.co.uk
upcoming courses
Online Study Sessions
We love to bring people together to study literature. Join us for individual lectures or seasons, short courses, or a week-long summer course. Most of our courses are live online. We focus on nineteenth and twentieth century writers and on Shakespeare and Greek Tragedy, with a particular interest in Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries.
Online Study Sessions
Our 2024-25 Virginia Woolf Season is on the theme of Woolf and Politics and runs from September 2024 to June 2025. Bookings are open.
Our Women Writers Season runs from January to December 2025. We will study great books by women writers from Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Barrett Browing, poetry, and George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872) to great works of the early 20thC by Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Vita Sackville-West, Malachi Whitaker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Inez Holden. Bookings are open.
We offer short courses (4 to 6 sessions) on particular writers and themes: on George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth von Arnim, Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy, Katherine Mansfield, the Bloomsbury Group, Literary Gardens, and many others.
We also offer short courses (2 sessions) on close reading individual poets. So far we have studied Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and 20thC Irish poets. More close reading courses will take place in 2024-25, studying Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Tennyson, Coleridge, Shelley, and more. See list below. And see our Calendar for the full list of courses.
Please note that the courses and seasons are currently all live online. In most courses, participants can have access to a recording of the lecture for a period after the live event.
For the Online Courses and Seasons see these pages:
2024
Virginia Woolf Season, September 2024 to June 2025.
Women and Power in mid-20thC Fiction with Miles Leeson, Sept. to 20 Oct. 2024. Course has finished.
Contemporary Novel course with Joseph Steinberg, Oct.-Dec. 2024. Bookings now closed.
London in Literature course I with Angela Harris, Sept.-Oct. 2024. SOLD OUT.
Close Reading the Poetry of William Wordsworth with Mariah Whelan, Oct. 2024. SOLD OUT.
Close Reading Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney with Mariah Whelan, Nov.-Dec. 2024. SOLD OUT
Close Reading Irish Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin with Mariah Whelan, Dec. 2024.
Lecture for Peace: Trudi Tate on A Room of One’s Own: After the First World War. 27 Dec. 2024. All proceeds to peace charities.
2025
Passion and Violence in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy with Fred Parker and Jan Parker, January-February 2025.
Women Writers Season, Jan.-Dec. 2025, from Mary Shelley to Elizabeth Bowen.
Close Reading the Poetry of Anne Sexton with Mariah Whelan, Jan. 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Sylvia Plath with Mariah Whelan, Feb. 2025.
Bloomsbury: Art and Politics with Karina Jakubowicz, Feb.-March 2025.
Oscar Wilde: Man of Many Parts with Alison Hennegan, March-May 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Coleridge with Mariah Whelan, April 2025.
Comedy and Irony in the Young Jane Austen with Fred Parker, May 2025.
Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death with Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison, Trudi Tate and Karina Jakubowicz, May-June 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Mary Oliver with Mariah Whelan (repeat course), June 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Tennyson with Mariah Whelan, June 2025.
London in Literature course 2 with Angela Harris, September-November 2025.
Doris Lessing course with Anne-Laure Brevet, September-October 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Shelley, September 2025.
Women and Power in 20thC Novels: 1950s-1980s with Miles Leeson, September-November 2025.
Close Reading the Poetry of Keats with Mariah Whelan, November 2025.
George Orwell: Power, Freedom, Decency with Lisa Mullen, September-October 2025.
Elizabeth von Arnim: Men, Women and Dogs with Isobel Maddison and Juliane Römhild, October-December 2025.
Lectures for Peace
We hold a regular lecture to raise money for refugee charities. Since 2020, we have donated to Freedom from Torture, Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, and others. In 2024, we are extending our support to Oxfam Gaza, Standing Together (Palestinian and Jewish peace movement) as well as Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. All proceedings from these lectures are shared equally between the named charities. 2024 Lectures for Peace page. Please help us to support the important work of these charities.
Summer Courses
Each summer course focuses on a particular author or theme. Taught by leading scholars in the field, they offer a rare chance to combine the study of literature with relevant walks, visits, and excursions.
Our courses include lectures, supervisions, discussions and above all close reading, in the tradition of Cambridge English since the 1920s. We explore the historical context of the books, asking what they have to say about their own time, and how they speak to ours.
In 2025 we offer a summer course on Virginia Woolf: Writing Life. This runs first live online, 10-14 July 2025, then in person in Cambridge, 20-25 July 2025. Bookings are open.
Our Authors
We study: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth von Arnim, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, HD, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing, Medbh McGuckian, Katherine Mansfield, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Margaret Oliphant, George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Douglas Stuart, Alfred Tennyson, William Thackeray, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Malachi Whitaker, Oscar Wilde, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and more.
About our Lecturers
Our lecturers are current or recent lecturers from the University of Cambridge and from other leading universities, including Oxford, Oxford Brookes, King’s College London, University College London, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.
On the Blog
News of courses, book reviews, and more.
Podcast: The Virginia Woolf PodcasT
Presented by Karina Jakubowicz
In 2019 Karina recorded a podcast about Woolf's former home, Monk's House. It attracted a lot of interest, being listened to over 800 times in the months that followed.
It was also truly rewarding to make, and promoted conversations that might not have otherwise taken place. This inspired us to create The Virginia Woolf Podcast, a series designed to discover Woolf’s impact on art, philosophy, and politics in the present day, as well as Woolf’s interest in the arts and ideas of her own time. By winter 2023, the podcasts had been heard by 15,000 people.
Karina Jakubowicz.
Photo by Seb Peters 2023
Summer course lectures at Clare Hall, 2023
STUDY
Take time each day in the summer course to read and think, and share the fruits of your reading in discussions and supervisions. Our students are all ages from 18 to 70+.
Clare Walker Gore’s supervision group, Clare Hall 2023
STAY
Our summer courses are based in a Cambridge college. You live, study, and share some meals with the course participants. A rare opportunity to live and work with other keen students of your subject. In 2025 our summer course lectures take place in the relaxed setting of Clare Hall. You can book accommodation at next-door Robinson College, or elsewhere.
Visit to the Wren Library, Trinity College, 2018
EXPLORE
Our summer courses include walks, talks, and excursions in Cambridge to places such as the Wren Library at Trinity (above), Girton College, Newnham College, King's College, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and other places of interest.
THE CAMBRIDGE EXPERIENCE
There is nothing quite like studying in the beautiful city of Cambridge.
Walking through the ancient colleges, you join generations of scholars who take the time to read seriously and to think about that reading.
The city is small, so you can get around by bus or bike or on foot. There are beautiful gardens in which to sit and think and do more reading. Throughout the summer there are superb concerts, art exhibitions, museums and films. Above all, you meet many amazing people who have come to Cambridge for sheer love of learning.
'It is a huge pleasure to offer our unique courses here in Cambridge. Virginia Woolf often visited Cambridge and was a lively participant in intellectual debates. This is the perfect place to explore the work of Woolf and many other brilliant writers. We have been offering summer courses in Cambridge since 2016, with a break during the pandemic. We enjoyed our 2024 course on Virginia Woolf and Childhood in Cambridge enormously; many thanks to our wonderful participants who came from all over the world to study literature together. We continue to offer many live online courses and seasons, as well as our in-person summer course in Cambridge. We hope to offer both kinds of courses, online and in Cambridge, long into the future.’
-TRUDI TATE, Director, Literature Cambridge
Banner image: Jeremy Peters @jezpete