Diana Grosser: Summer course in Cambridge 2023

Virginia Woolf’s Women: Summer Course in Cambridge

I was overjoyed when, in 2022, Literature Cambridge announced they would bring back the Virginia Woolf in-person summer course for 2023. The 2022 online experience was behind me, and I assumed the in-person variant would be even better. I had no idea.

Girton College, July 2023. Photo: Seb Peters.

The organisation was impeccable. My brother lives in the UK and I visit him regularly every year, but it wouldn’t occur to him to inform me about train strikes or give me suggestions for sightseeing (bookshops even less so). Trudi’s organisation team thought of all that and more. There was a contingent of rooms booked at Robinson College (just across the street from the lecture hall at Clare Hall) and enough information to make up a small folder including everything necessary to make our stay in Cambridge as pleasant as possible. A welcome dinner was scheduled to take place on the evening before the first lecture day, and it turned out to be a great opportunity to meet some of the lecturers ahead of time and to get to know some of the other 36 participants in the course.

Literature Cambridge Administrator Julie Wendel with Director Dr Trudi Tate. Photo: Seb Peters.

Monday morning 9 o’clock. You think there are five days of books, reading and talking ahead of you and suddenly you find yourself on Saturday morning getting ready to leave and with a whole new world of thought to busy yourself with over the next months, maybe even years. The 5 days were so rich in information, perspective and delightful subjectivity that simply saying we read and studied Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando and Between the Acts does the whole experience little justice. The lectures were full of insight, as usual (high quality is standard for Literature Cambridge lectures), but actually being there, in the room, with everyone else, strengthened the idea that this is a shared experience, to which everyone brings something and out of which everyone gets something. What I brought was reading, re-reading and questions, but what I took were moments that by now have turned into memories.

Alison Hennegan at Girton College. Photo: Seb Peters.

The question of ‘Woman’ accompanied us for the whole week during the morning lectures and stayed with us though the afternoons, when the extra activities were planned. The lectures and the talks encouraged us to look critically at how Woolf writes women in her works, but also offered information on some of the women in Woolf’s life. Ellie Mitchell talked about Elizabeth, the possibly misunderstood daughter of Mrs Dalloway, and Trudi Tate offered a view on the complicated relationship between Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. Alison Hennegan wrapped the impossible question of ‘What is a woman’ around Orlando’s 400-year life-span and marvellously paired it with A Room of One’s Own. Leaning on this essay, Karina Jakubowicz explored the role of Jane Harrison in Woolf’s writing and Claire Davison returned to Between the Acts, this time with an eye on the influence of Ethel Smyth in Woolf’s life and the feminist politics of the age. All these texts were brought to life in the afternoons, during our visits to Girton and Newnham, the first women’s colleges in Cambridge, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, which houses a manuscript draft of A Room of One’s Own.

I left Cambridge on Saturday morning, but only headed back home to Germany, to real life, on Monday morning. I had two more days to sort through and go over the entire experience in my head. Some moments were already lost, but some anchored in the passing of time. I’m slowly learning to appreciate distance in time, as I now believe it will allow this Woolf experience, and I’m sure, the many more literary experiences to come, to ripen and bloom to their fullest.

Diana Grosser
Munich

Angela Harris supervising her group

Warmest thanks to Diana and to all the wonderful participants in our 2023 summer courses, both online and in Cambridge. In 2024, we offer two courses again, one online and the other in person in Cambridge, on the theme of Woolf and Childhood.