Hello and welcome!

I’m Ann, and this is my blog and newsletter, now on Substack as a 2024 featured publication. I write about hidden corners of literature, Cambridge women’s stories from the late 19th century, the brightest and best of current biography and memoir-writing and news and reviews from the arts and publishing worlds.

I’m a published author and a freelance writer since 2016, reviewing books and writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement and other publications. I’m also an award-winning independent researcher (thank you, Women’s History Network!) who is often to be found in the archives poring over the letters and diaries of the women who settled in Cambridge from the 1870s onwards.

The title Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society celebrates twelve women who established an intellectual discussion club in what was an elite male university town from 1890 to 1914: Caroline Jebb, Mary Paley Marshall, Ida Darwin, Eleanor Sidgwick, Kathleen Lyttelton, Ellen Darwin, Mary Ward, Louise Creighton, Margaret Verrall, Maud Darwin, Fanny Prothero and Eliza Von Hügel. They were described by the economist John Maynard Keynes as ‘a remarkable group’.

I’m also writing about literature, memoir and 20th-century writers’ lives. My most popular blogposts include ‘Memories in a house’, my essay on how the children’s writer Lucy Boston restored a derelict Manor near Cambridge during World War Two; the influence of Cambridge artist and writer Gwen Raverat’s house by the river throughout her life; and Sylvia Plath ‘at home’ in her first married flat at Newnham in Cambridge during the bleak winter of 1956-7. In August 2024 I began the first bookgroup for this publication, discussing F.M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter.

I hope you’ll find something you enjoy here, and that you’ll join us in this friendly community.