At Literature Cambridge we have a regular lecture to support refugee charities. This year we also want to do something to help the people of Gaza and to support those working for peace.

We are offering some extra lectures in 2024-25, live online. All proceeds to be shared between three charities:

• Oxfam Gaza and Lebanon Campaign (food and medical relief to Gaza and Lebanon)
• Standing Together (Palestinian and Israeli joint peace campaign, currently taking aid into Gaza); updates on their Instagram page
• Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (helping refugees in the UK)

In Summer 2024 we raised £1,400, shared between the charities from our lectures on Woolf and Forster. Very many thanks for your support.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929): After the First World War, with Trudi Tate

This lecture looks at Woolf’s great book on women and fiction in its historical context. The book was published a decade after the end of the Great War of 1914-1918. How does Woolf think about the war in relation to feminism in the late 1920s?

For Woolf, as for many intellectuals of the period, the war changed things very profoundly. How had European civilisation come to destroy itself this devastating conflict? Indeed, perhaps the war threw the very idea of civilisation into question.

The need to rebuild fractured societies and to secure a just peace were surely the most pressing issues for Britain and for all of Europe in the 1920s. Women must be part of that process. How did the war alter our perception of the world, and where should we go next? What part might literature play in this process?

All proceeds to be shared between the charities above, to contribute in some small way to those who work for peace today.

The session lasts for 2 hours, with a 60-minute lecture followed by a seminar discussion / Q+A. The lecture will be recorded, and people who have booked can listen again for 48 hours after the event. The seminar discussion is not recorded.

Friday 27 December 2024 live online

18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Morning or lunchtime in the Americas

To book, please make a donation to one or more of the charities via the buttons below, to a total of:

£33.00 full price (£11.00 to each charity)
£27.00 students and unwaged (£9.00 to each charity)
£27.00 CAMcard holders (£9.00 to each charity)

We suggest that people support all 3 charities equally, but it is up to you to decide how to distribute your donation.

Why pay the charities directly? Because, if you donate directly to the charities, they get the full sum. Whereas if you book via the website, 20% VAT (Value Added Tax) is deducted from the payment (even though it is for charity, VAT is still payable).

Please email us with a copy of the donation receipt and we will add you to the attendance list. If you have any problems doing this, please let us know and we will help to sort it out.

Thank you so much for your support.

Orts, Scraps and Fragments: Thoughts on Peace in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), with Claire Davison

Set on a midsummer’s day in a remote English village where the annual pageant is to be performed, Between the Acts nevertheless engages directly with conflict. It offers a biting, yet often hilarious satire of ‘Merrie England’, where family traditions, small communities and age-old customs all play a part in the war-mongering violence of imperialism, nationalism, and patriarchy.

The astonishing beauty of the novel, however, is that at the very heart of disharmony and cacophony, the still, small voices of peace and resolution can yet be heard. This lecture will pick up on these fragmented, dispersed echoes, and their offer of hope and appeasement beyond and in spite of an inevitable countdown to war. Focusing particularly on the rich sonic environment, it traces what we might call a pageant of peace emerging from the gaps within the disruptive village performance. This medley of musical fragments, ‘stray voices’, random quotations and calls from the natural world will in turn be explored in terms of Woolf’s vivid interest in the radio.

Although essentially on Between the Acts, the lecture will also evoke Woolf’s essay ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air-Raid’ (1940). A copy of the essay will be attached to the hand-out.

Saturday 6 September 2025 live online