Women writers: Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bowen in Cambridge

A Cambridge Summer Course beginning today, July 9:

Women writers: Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bowen
9 to 13 July 2018
Homerton College, Cambridge

This course studies five great women writers working in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will study one book per day, with accessible lectures, discussions, and supervisions (tutorials) in the Cambridge style.

Our teachers include leading Cambridge scholars Gillian Beer, Aoife Byrne, Alison Hennegan, Trudi Tate and Clare Walker Gore.

'We think back through our mothers, if we are women', wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own (1929). But is this always true? Woolf herself read deeply and widely across all of English literature, and by no means restricted herself to writing by women. But she, like other major women writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, perhaps enabled more women to take themselves seriously as writers, and to commit themselves to the highest standards of literature.
Is there a 'women's tradition' in English Literature – a literature of one's own? Are these helpful ways of thinking about writing by women, or is it better to consider women, like men, in their full cultural and historical context?
We will explore these and other questions as we study five major works by women writers. They are all wonderful books in their very different ways, and they raise questions and ideas which remain relevant to everyone, women and men, writers and readers, right up to the present day.

Lecture list
Alison Hennegan on Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Clare Walker Gore on George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Trudi Tate on Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Claire Davison on Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Aoife Byrne on Elizabeth Bowen, To the North (1932)