Dec 2018
Christmas by the fireside
A masterpiece of mystery and suspense, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, is my ghost story of choice for this year’s festive Bite. Bites is an excellent opportunity to learn new ways of approaching a book in a single session – great if you’re pushed for time or want to tickle your taste buds before deciding to join me on one of my standard 6 week courses. What could be better than the prospect of spending two hours absorbed…
Find out more »Christmas by the fireside
A masterpiece of mystery and suspense, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is my ghost story of choice for this year’s festive Bite. Bites is an excellent opportunity to learn new ways of approaching a book in a single session – great if you’re pushed for time or want to tickle your taste buds before deciding to join me on one of my standard 6 week courses. What could be better than the prospect of spending two hours absorbed…
Find out more »Jan 2019
Uncharted Waters: Virginia Woolf
In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s experiments with narrative technique and multiple perspectives take the novel into uncharted waters, exploring individual consciousness, interweaving lives and unspoken memories and desires in ways that are at once challengingly innovative and refreshingly direct. Yet these are not mere technical experiments: both novels are moving explorations of family relationships and conflicts, of the shattering effects of the First World War and the very nature of artistic creation. This course runs over 6 weeks and…
Find out more »Uncharted waters: Virginia Woolf
In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s experiments with narrative technique and multiple perspectives take the novel into uncharted waters, exploring individual consciousness, interweaving lives and unspoken memories and desires in ways that are at once challengingly innovative and refreshingly direct. Yet these are not mere technical experiments: both novels are moving explorations of family relationships and conflicts, of the shattering effects of the First World War and the very nature of artistic creation. This course runs over 6 weeks and…
Find out more »Uncharted Waters: Virginia Woolf
In Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s experiments with narrative technique and multiple perspectives take the novel into uncharted waters, exploring individual consciousness, interweaving lives and unspoken memories and desires in ways that are at once challengingly innovative and refreshingly direct. Yet these are not mere technical experiments: both novels are moving explorations of family relationships and conflicts, of the shattering effects of the First World War and the very nature of artistic creation. This course runs over 6 weeks and…
Find out more »Feb 2019
Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
I first read Jane Eyre as a teenager and was immediately captivated by the rebellious spirit of Jane’s voice and her journey from downtrodden outsider to mistress of all she surveys. Jane got to have it all. Or did she? In this course you will have the opportunity to see the novel as both a liberated portrait of female desire and as a darker engagement with issues of sex, power and race. In the final two weeks of the course we will turn…
Find out more »Apr 2019
Property and Propriety: Mansfield Park and Howards End
Mansfield Park is Austen’s least-loved novel but it happens to be one of my favourites. Of all her novels, it is the one written on the widest canvas and the only one to be named after a house (Northanger Abbey was given its name posthumously by Austen’s brother – she in fact called it, Susan). Austen does nothing accidentally so we should take this as a clue. Written 100 years apart, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and E.M. Forster’s Howards End are both novels about the…
Find out more »