past online study sessions

Past Courses (most recent courses first). All live online via Zoom

Women and Power in mid-20thC Fiction
Women writers of the 1950s and 1960s

Live online course with Miles Leeson, University of Chichester, Sept-Oct. 2024

The history of women's writing has always been one of contestation and the desire for agency. In this course Miles Leeson, an expert in mid-Twentieth Century women's writing, will introduce and discuss four key novels from the period:

• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)
• Barbara Comyns, The Vet's Daughter (1959)
• Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• Brigid Brophy, The Snow Ball (1964).

Drawing on cultural and historical documentation, interviews and personal journals, this course will provide a deeper insight into the burgeoning development of women's writing between the Second World War and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

GEORGE ORWELL: POWER, FREEDOM, DECENCY

Mondays, weekly, 8 April to 6 May 2024, 6.00-8.00 pm UK Summer Time

More than any other writer of the twentieth century, Orwell made his name synonymous with the big questions which define the modern world. What does power look like? What does freedom entail? How can we help each other to live honest, decent lives?

Orwell prized his lifelong ability to ‘face unpleasant facts’; his curiosity and restless intelligence helped him scythe through humbug. Yet while his work identifies important problems, it doesn’t provide neat solutions to them. Indeed, Orwell never claimed to have the answers: he was eternally alert to his own eccentricities, contradictions, and failings. He hated snobbery, yet nursed a deep snobbery within himself. His down-to-earth manner masked a fierce intellectual vanity. Above all, though he was political to his bones, he never found a party line with which he could wholeheartedly agree. Having spent decades honing his craft and attempting, as he put it, ‘to turn political writing into an art’, he concluded that his foibles and inconsistencies were too closely entwined with his ideas ever to be eradicated. Perhaps that’s why, on the page, Orwell is unfailingly good company; frequently surprising, sometimes infuriating, never boring.

In this course we will explore five of Orwell’s most compelling books and the big ideas behind them. Along the way, we will try to rediscover the real Orwell – the man behind the talismanic name. What can his work tell us about the era of war, revolution, and upheaval through which he lived? And what, if anything, can he tell us about our own fractured times?

Our lecturer is Dr Lisa Mullen, Senior Teaching Associate in English and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge.

Lectures

Lecture 1     Love and money: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Lecture 2     Truth and lies: Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Lecture 3     Home and memory: Coming up for Air (1939)

Lecture 4     Equality and humanity: Animal Farm (1945)

Lecture 5     Freedom and fear: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

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Iris Murdoch and Love

Live online course
Thursdays, 7 March to 2 May 2024, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British Time

‘Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.’ - Iris Murdoch

Love, in its many forms, is the main theme of all of Iris Murdoch’s novels. She explores the complexities of love alongside desire, trauma, grief, loss, and joy and their effects, both tragic and comic.

We began by looking at a selection of non-fictional and biographical works to explore Murdoch’s thoughts on love, and then we studied the set four novels with these thoughts in mind. The lectures aimed to to build up a picture of an author whose entire life revolved around love and its aftereffects.

With Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Centre, University of Chichester

Lecture list

Lecture 1. Essays on love in Existentialists and Mystics. 7 March 2024
Lecture 2. The Sandcastle (1957). 21 March 2024
Lecture 3. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). 4 April 2024
Lecture 4. The Sea, The Sea (1978). 18 April 2024
Lecture 5. The Philosopher's Pupil (1983). 2 May 2024

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Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Prose

Saturdays, weekly, 10 February to 2 March 2024. Live online. SOLD OUT.

Writer and lecturer Dr Mariah Whelan led a live online exploration of the life and writing of Sylvia Plath.

What is the relationship between biography and poetics in Plath’s work? What do we mean when we describe Plath as a Confessional poet? How has this description been used to limit and contain Plath’s literary reputation? How important are other themes in Plath’s work such as death, the occult and nature? 

In the second part of our sessions, we used seminar-style discussion to delve further into these questions. We undertook close readings of Plath’s poems and novel to enhance our enjoyment of the texts and to understand the contexts in which they were written. We also thought about what shapes our understanding of them today.  

Aims:

The aims of this course are:

• to introduce participants to Plath’s literary output, including key poems and prose writing (novel, journals and critical writing)
• to analyse the way in which Plath’s writing interacts with the social and political contexts in which it was written 
• to consider Plath’s writing in light of key themes including identity, gender, sexuality, motherhood, death and nature
• to develop skills of close reading and analysis 

Week 1: Plath as Confessional Poet

Who was Sylvia Plath? What was it like to be a woman and a writer in 1950s America? How did the Confessional School of poetry shape Plath’s writing? In this introductory session, we will explore Plath’s biography and how the social and political contexts in which she wrote shaped her ideas about poetry and literature. 

Week 2: The Early Poems

In this session we will take a close look at the early poetry of Sylvia Plath. We will focus on themes of identity, freedom, constraint, gender, death and nature. We will explore the poems in the contexts in which they were written and we will also ask how our own experiences shape our interpretation of the poems today. 

Week 3: The Later Poems

In Week 3 we will explore the later poems of Sylvia Plath, focusing on those written shortly before her death. How had Plath’s poetry changed as she matured? How did her themes and ideas evolve? We will explore these questions using close textual analysis of the poems. 

Week 4: Plath’s novel The Bell Jar

In our final week, we will explore Plath’s only finished novel for adults,The Bell Jar(1963). What did it mean to be an intelligent young woman in 1950s America? What did the novel form offer Plath that poetry did not? In this session we will explore these questions while also addressing the novel’s preoccupation with mental illness and death

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Women Writers of the 1920s. Jan-Feb. 2024. SOLD OUT

With Alison Hennegan, University of Cambridge

In this course we explored some of the richness and diversity of women writing in the 1920s.

Male tyranny in marriage, the emergence of golden age detective fiction, comic yet deeply moving explorations of religious and spiritual conflict, and the deepening awareness of the centrality and power of love between women are themes central to the four books we shall read and discuss.

Live online lectures and seminars with Alison Hennegan, retired Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. Four sessions, fortnightly on Tuesdays, 9 January to 20 February 2024, 6.00-8.00 pm British time (GMT).

Set reading

• Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (1921)
• Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927)
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel (1927)

Lectures

Lecture 1. Elizabeth von Arnim, Vera (1921). Tuesday 9 Jan. 2024, 6.00-8.00 pm

Throughout her long writing life, male domestic tyranny was one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s constant themes. In this novel which many consider her best we gradually learn, through the discoveries of a second wife, the fate which befell her predecessor.

Lecture 2. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). Tuesday 23 Jan. 2024, 6.00 pm

The ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction begins in the 1920s and Christie quickly emerged as one of its queens. In this novel, critically considered a landmark in the development of the genre, she spectacularly breaks one of the rules of the game …

Lecture 3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927). Tues. 6 Feb. 2024, 6.00 pm

This remarkable and often rather elusive short novel was Townsend Warner’s second. When Mr Fortune, a middle-aged Anglican priest, opts to spend a year as a missionary on a remote island where he is the only white man, his world is transformed in richly startling ways which cause him to question much of what he believes and knows. This book extends the themes which underpin Lolly Willowes, Townsend Warner’s first novel.

Lecture 4. Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel (1927). Tues. 20 Feb. 2024, 6.00 pm

Elizabeth Bowen would emerge as a major writer during the interwar years, much admired by Woolf. This early novel explores the tensions and crises which beset a group of ex-patriate Englishwomen seeking various forms of escape abroad. Published just one year before Radclyffe Hall’s prosecuted novel, The Well of Loneliness, it addresses the disruptive power of female same-sex love and emotion.

JANE AUSTEN: WOMEN AND SOCIETY COURSE 2024

With Fred Parker, Clare College, University of Cambridge. SOLD OUT

Austen's novels all have at their heart the relation between a woman and her social environment. That environment, always brilliantly conveyed, is shown as variously constraining or depressing or otherwise impoverished. Opportunities for self-expression are few; financial realities, class structures, and gender protocols weigh heavy; and the prospect of women's emancipation into independence which Mary Wollstonecraft had recently envisaged is still far, far away. But that environment is all that there is; in an Austen novel, there is nowhere apart from social reality – no life away on the wild Yorkshire moors (Emily Bronte), nor secure internal possession of 'a room of one's own' (Virginia Woolf).

The particular focus of this course will therefore be the various resources and strategies that Austen's women employ to make space for themselves to live more fully within and despite their world – resources of fantasy, or defiance, or reserve, or wit, or perhaps even the capacity to grieve over the life denied. Among these resources is, almost always, reading, and this may lead us to think about Austen herself, and her own resourcefulness as a maker of fictions that both accept and transfigure the terms of the world in which she lived. We will pay attention to the special qualities of the wonderful narrative voice she creates.

Unlike Austen herself, the women in her novels end in marriage, making some kind of peace with their societal destiny. We shall be looking at the courtship process by which this comes about, and asking, in each different case, about the balance between compromise and resourcefulness rewarded which is implied. What kind of solution does love represent?

We will work through the five most important novels one by one, in their likely order of composition. This should help to bring out both the trajectory of Austen's development, and the different kind of achievement which each book represents.

Five sessions, fortnightly on Sundays, from 14 January to 10 March 2024.

Lectures

Sunday 14 January 2024    Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Sunday 28 January 2024    Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Sunday 11 February 2024    Mansfield Park (1814)
Sunday 25 February 2024   Emma (1815)
Sunday 10 March 2024   Persuasion (1817)

Course Fees

£250 full price for 5 sessions (includes 20% VAT)
£225 discount price for students and CAMcard holders (includes 20% VAT)

Each session lasts from 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm British Time (GMT), live online via Zoom. Please check the time in your time zone.

Optional Further Reading

Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (CUP, 1997; 2006)
Jenny Davidson, Reading Jane Austen (CUP, 2017)
Roger Gard, Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity (Yale UP, 1994)
John Mullan, What Matters in Jane Austen? (Bloomsbury, 2012)
Fred Parker, On Declaring Love: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen (Routledge, 2018)
Peter Sabor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Emma (CUP, 2015)
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Macmillan, 1986; 2007)
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Penguin, 2012)
John Wiltshire, The Hidden Jane Austen (CUP, 2014)

Links

• Chronology and details of the novels: Jane Austen Society.
• John Mullan on courtship, love and marriage in Jane Austen’s novels, British Library website.

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