Summer in Cambridge
Gertrud Fahlin reflects on the 2024 Summer Course in Cambridge
People sometimes ask why I spend a week of my summer holidays studying in Cambridge. I will try and explain what brings me back to the Literature Cambridge summer courses on Virginia Woolf.
From the moment you arrive, from registration and the welcome dinner in Clare Hall, you are included in a Woolfian community of interesting and nice people from all over the world. You do not need lengthy small talk because you are all excited to be there to learn more about and discuss Virginia Woolf's books and also to experience Cambridge.
At Angela Harris’ lecture in Clare Hall
In 2024, many like me chose to stay in Robinson College close to Clare Hall where the lectures and supervisions took place. The location is convenient and you also meet people from the course for breakfast and can arrange excursions, lunches or dinners together.
The lectures each morning were superb, covering the five books on our reading list and more. Since coming home I have listened to the lectures and talks again on recordings made available by Literature Cambridge. I have discovered even more because the lectures are very rich.
After each day’s lecture and a cup of tea, we had supervisions (tutorials) in small groups. I very much enjoyed the supervisions with Alison Hennegan, who is among many things a retired Fellow in English at Trinity Hall. Alison started the discussion by asking everyone what we were most eager to discuss. With great skill she then led the one-hour discussion so that it covered our interests and much more. With her long experience and deep knowledge Alison gave us insightful feedback on our questions, helped us to develop our own thoughts and gave us interesting new perspectives on the books. The group worked very well together. I deeply appreciated the views of the other three members of my group who I got to know during the week through discussions in the supervisions and afterwards.
Thinking about the theme of Woolf and Childhood, our group discussed the inaccessibility and elusive nature of childhood memories once you become an adult, the ever-changing identities expressed by Woolf as I now and I then and also I tomorrow, the interplay between childhood memories and literary creativity in Virginia Woolf’s work resulting in the blurred boundaries between fiction and memoir. Before the course I was searching for a meaningful way to read Jacob's Room (1922) as I found the portrait of Jacob so vague. Thanks to the lectures and the supervision, I understood that the anonymity of Jacob could be read as a very meaningful way to express the tragedy of the deaths of so many young men in the First World War. Karina Jakubovicz’s lecture also explored the likeness between Jacob and Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby, who had died young.
The course programme took us to visit King’s College and its beautiful Chapel and Trinity College with the famous Wren Library. Both colleges are still full of the spirit of Virginia Woolf and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group. (E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes were both Fellows of King’s; Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, Adrian Stephen and others were all students at Trinity.)
Peter Jones’ lecture at King’s College
In King’s College we could imagine the Manx cat crossing the lawn through the same college windows as Woolf’s narrator saw it in A Room of One's Own (1929). The connections between the Bloomsbury Group and King’s College could be seen through the many paintings and decorations, especially by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in the rooms of John Maynard Keynes and throughout the college.
On the doorsteps to the Wren Library in Trinity College the librarian Steven Archer read aloud to us from A Room of One's Own. Unlike the narrator in the book we were all made very welcome into the more than 300 year old library, which ‘touches the very soul of any one who first sees it’, as Roger North wrote in 1695. The light came in from the surrounding large windows above the original Wren bookshelves filled with valuable books. Alfred Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and many others celebrate the greatness of the past by their statues leading up to the life size statue of Lord Byron at the far end of the beautiful room. Though experts have told the librarians that the valuable books might be better preserved in a modern archive, Trinity College refuses to move the books elsewhere, because, as Steven said, what is a library without books. During our visit we saw the very much alive library used by librarians and students, all busy working among the beautiful bookshelves.
Steven had prepared a display of books, letters and archive material related to Virginia Woolf, family and friends including first editions of Virginia Woolf’s books and a personal letter to Leonard Woolf written by a friend when Virginia was still missing in spring 1941.
At the opening dinner
One evening, we went to the play Vita and Virginia by Eileen Atkins, based on the letters between Vita Sackville-West and Woolf. This was a most rewarding experience. A talk by Ann Kennedy Smith on Julian Bell and Virginia Woolf at Waterstone’s Bookshop and a lecture and performance by Jeremy Thurlow on music important to Virginia Woolf gave valuable resonance to the week. We also had some time to visit the many museums, book shops, tea gardens, pubs and the open-air Shakespeare Festival in Cambridge.
The compelling lectures by prominent Woolf scholars, inspiring supervisions, engaging visits to colleges and fascinating cultural events all deepened the experience of reading Virginia Woolf’s work. We also gained a better understanding of the importance of the Cambridge environment for the entire Bloomsbury Group. These are all reasons to spend my summer holiday on a course with Literature Cambridge – and, finally, it is a great experience to feel included in a Woolfian community and to form new friendships.
Gertrud Fahlin
Hallands län
Sweden
