Coincidentally, has also written about Queen Elizabeth I in an elegant review of a new exhibition of four portraits painted during her lifetime. Do have a look at the striking ‘Clopton’ portrait of the Tudor queen, which dates from the first years of her accession to the throne in 1558. It depicts her wearing a dark business-like dress edged with delicate white ermine and wielding a book like an instrument of power.

‘… the book is closed and held firmly in her hand. It is a statement, a thing proffered. And yet that ermine is so exquisitely done it feels as if the slightest breath could move it; and the cuffs and the ruff are picked out in gold that positively glows electric against the black fabrics with the possibilities of power. Perhaps it is just me, but do I see a slight smile of triumph on her face?’

Read on for more about Elizabeth Jenkins as the biographer of three formidable women, and what the heroine of The Tortoise and the Hare has in common with the Tudor queen. These deep-dive literary posts are a monthly extra for my paying subscribers, with warm thanks for your support (below is a voucher if you decide to subscribe or upgrade in June). Coming up in Part 4: I’ll look at sex (or the lack of it) and descriptions of clothes in The Tortoise and the Hare.

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Hello! and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. It’s been incredibly hot here these past few days, but a week ago, as I cycled home from the library on a Friday evening, the Cam was looking especially peaceful with the punts neatly moored. Don’t let that fool you. On sunny days, this stretch of the river is usually jam-packed, and the warm weather always brings many visitors to Cambridge. There’s so much to celebrate about its beauty and history, but at this time of year I am always reminded of a notorious date, 21st May 1897, when thousands of men crowded into King’s Parade to protest against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. You can see the photo and read my post about that day below, but for now here’s a peaceful glimpse of the life of Helen Gladstone, who in 1887 preferred ‘not to ask for degrees, but not to appear to reject them if they are offered.’ Yet in 1897 she would take a stand for the sake of women’s education, and ask her father William Gladstone for his support.

The education of Helen Gladstone

Helen Gladstone, educationist, was born in London on 28 August 1849, the sixth of seven surviving children of Catherine (née Glynne) and William Ewart Gladstone (who would later become British prime minister four times). She grew up in the midst of a warm extended family at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire, Wales and fully expected to spend her adult life there, doing charitable work and helping out in village schools. Then her unmarried older sister Mary paid a visit to Cambridge to see the fledgling new college for women there , which had recently established itself near the village of Newnham. She came back to Hawarden bubbling with enthusiasm about higher education for women, and convinced Helen that she should try it out for a year. Mary would stay at home, as an unmarried middle-class daughter was expected to do, helping her mother to run the household.

Helen herself was full of doubts, having only had governess lessons in the past, and unsure that a secular college would be the right place for her. Mary had correctly intuited her passion for learning, however, and persuaded their father it was a respectable place to send his daughter. So in 1877 Helen began her studies at Newnham College. At 28, she was possibly the oldest of the twenty-five students there, and continued to worry that she was neglecting her ‘home duties’ by studying at Cambridge. But, as she told herself, her presence in Cambridge would help to break down prejudices more generally about women’s university education. ‘The fact of a daughter of Papa... being sent here ought to have a good influence’ she wrote.

Her father’s daughter

William Gladstone, who would become Prime Minister for the second time in 1880, was against university education for women in principle (in 1890 he complained about the ‘invasion’ of women students at his own alma mater, Oxford University), but he made an exception in his daughter’s case.  Of the Gladstones’ seven surviving children, Helen was thought to resemble her father most, and at Newnham he often found his way into her thoughts and conversations: ‘certainly one could not be ten minutes in her company without knowing that he was her father’, a former student recalled. ‘Indeed I think one of the things that kept her such a very “unmarried” person was her ingrained attitude of daughter. This went beyond her earthly father, through to God.’

Helen was indeed deeply religious, and regularly attended services at Selwyn College – the Gladstones had donated generously towards building the new chapel there – as Newnham had, from the outset, no chapel or religious affiliation. She had intended only to stay in Cambridge for a year, but ended up studying for three years, specialising in political economy. After finishing her studies she was asked to stay on as Secretary to the Principal, Eleanor Sidgwick, and in January 1882 she accepted the post of Vice-Principal of Newnham, with her father’s blessing.

‘Rather a tall person, in black’ was Helen Gladstone’s typically diffident description of herself, which, according to one former Cambridge student, was ‘not at all suggestive of that vivid and compelling personality with its alert and vigorous carriage and striking distinction of features and expression’.

Meeting the Darwins

Helen met Charles and Emma Darwin for the first time in Cambridge in 1880, introduced by Charles Darwin’s youngest son Horace and his wife Ida who were active supporters of the new college at Newnham. When Charles and Emma Darwin came to Cambridge to visit the couple in August 1880 they were introduced to their new friend Helen Gladstone. They all got on famously, so much so that Helen was invited to the Darwins’ family home in Kent the following summer, and they all met up again in Cambridge in October 1881.

Charles Darwin’s death in April 1882 came as a shock to Helen. A week later, on Wednesday 26 April 1882, she attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey. She went in the place of her father, who as Prime Minister was giving an important speech on the Irish question that day. It was true that this was a time of crisis for the British government: increasing political violence in Ireland had led to secret negotiations that, two weeks later, would see the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell released early from Kilmainham Gaol.

But there may have been other, more tactical reasons for Gladstone’s absence at Westminster Abbey. As a leading light in the Church of England, it might have been seen as inappropriate for him to attend the funeral of an agnostic naturalist whose theory of natural evolution had nothing to do with God. Helen's attendance at Darwin’s funeral was a personal expression of sorrow, as well as sympathy for the family, and it was doubtless more sincere than her father’s would have been.

A promotion

In 1886 Helen Gladstone was offered the post of Principal of the new Royal Holloway College for women in London. It was an acknowledgement of her significant contribution to women in higher education, and William Gladstone was deeply proud of his daughter. He wrote her a heartfelt letter urging her to accept the position. ‘Your life has a distinct purpose,’ he told her. ‘After all we have heard and seen, there can be no doubt that you have upon you the marks of a distinct vocation. The call is from on high and I really do not think you have a right to overlook, or not to follow the marks of it.’

Helen was touched by her father’s recognition of her work, and his respect for her much-loved college: Mr and Mrs Gladstone travelled to Newnham College to plant a tree there in 1887. It was a recognition of what had been achieved there to further women’s access to higher education, and a symbol that the movement would keep growing.

‘Wanted at home’

After much thought, Helen decided to turn down the offer of the London University position. Her sister Mary had recently married, so Helen might be required to return to Hawarden at any time to be with her ageing parents. In fact Helen was able to stay on as Vice-Principal at Newnham for another ten years, with the support of her college enabling frequent trips back home.

In 1896, just before she reluctantly left Cambridge to move back permanently to Hawarden, Helen Gladstone did one last, important thing. She wrote to her father to ask him to sign a memorial (petition) calling for women to be granted degrees ‘in some form’ from Cambridge University. There is no evidence that Gladstone ever signed it, and the vote was heavily defeated in the Senate House in 1897 in any case. Women would be refused Cambridge degrees for another fifty years, despite their excellent results, service to their country and contribution to teaching, research and scholarship: ‘an extreme case of shutting the stable door when the horse was out to grass’, as The Times put it in 1947.

For Helen Gladstone, it was perhaps enough to feel that she could count on her father’s support, and the work that she had done at Newnham College for almost twenty years had changed his mind about women and higher education.

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Secondary sources: ‘Gladstone, Helen (1849-1925), educationist’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Anne Isba, Gladstone and Women (Hambledon Continuum, 2006); Newnham College Roll ‘Letter’ January 1926; Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Pimlico, 2002); Philip Magus, Gladstone: A Biography (London: John Murray, 1954); ‘The Funeral of Charles Darwin’ (BBC World Service, Witness History). Primary sources include Emma Darwin’s diaries 242:44-7 and Ida Darwin’s Papers (both collections held in Special Collections, Cambridge University Library). With thanks to Anne Thomson, former Newnham College archivist and Elizabeth Stratton, Selwyn College archivist.

If you enjoyed this post, you might like my two posts below about the events of May 1897, when women were denied degrees at Cambridge University and riots broke out. Thank you for reading, and for your support (paid subscriptions enable me to keep doing this work).

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My diary has been full of literary-cultural-library treats this week, springing up everywhere like billowing clouds of white cow parsley by the river in Cambridge in May (after poetically mislabelling this lovely, ubiquitous wildflower as ‘meadowsweet’ in my photo of King’s College Chapel below, I’ve decided to lean into the flower theme).

Last Tuesday I was in Newnham College Library, looking at a rare copy of Theophrastus Such by George Eliot; it was her last published book, a best-seller in its day but little read these days. On Wednesday I braved torrential rain with a good friend and an umbrella to see a stunning new exhibition of flower paintings at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (details below); on Thursday I went to Cambridge University Library for a celebration of forty years of Poems on the Underground (more on this in a minute) and on Friday I gave a lunchtime talk at Newnham College, as part of its delightfully named ‘pudding seminar’ series, on the economist Mary Paley Marshall and the significance of her 1944 book bequest to the college library, including a unique annotated copy of the book she co-wrote with her husband Alfred Marshall, The Economics of Industry (1879). It’s such an enjoyable part of my work, being able to connect with others interested in my research into these pioneering Cambridge women, and I felt very honoured to be invited and to have such an engaged, encouraging audience.

On Saturday afternoon it was back to the busy city, when I travelled to Foyles bookshop in London to hear and discussing Helene Hanff’s epistolatory classic, 84 Charing Cross Road. It was an added treat to bump into fellow Substacker there – I have long admired her Substack, ‘The Austen Connection’, a public-humanities project connecting Austen’s literature to pop-culture and current events. So, all in all, a bouquet of delightful things.

Poems on the Underground

Forty years ago, having recently moved to Cambridge from Ireland, it was a huge treat to take the train to London for exhibitions and the occasional theatre outing on a Saturday afternoon. Getting a stuffy, crowded underground ‘tube’ train to the West End was a less enjoyable experience, and I admit that I was glad not to be a regular commuter. I don’t remember when, rattling along on the Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square, I first looked up and saw, alongside the advertisements, a strikingly designed, small rectangular-shaped poster with a poem on it. It was like a window into another world.

It seems that Judith Cherniak, an American writer who had moved to London, got the idea of scattering poetry in underground trains from reading As You Like It. The love-sick Orlando hangs sonnets from the branches of the Forest of Arden; Judith and the project’s co-founders Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert decided to place a rotating series of poems on tube trains where ordinary people might enjoy them, on the way to or from work. They aimed to offer ‘public glimpses of an imaginative world different from the common pressures from life’, as Cherniak writes in her introduction to the new, revised edition of 100 Poems on the Underground (The Poetry Business, 2026).

At the event I attended at Cambridge University Library last week, Cherniak was there, still full of great spirit and enthusiasm for the project which by now has made connections on public transport in major cities everywhere. She was accompanied by poets Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes who are now Judith’s co-editors on the project, which is supported by London Transport, the British Council and Arts Council England. As Cherniak points out, the poster designs by typographer Tom Davidson (which appear three times a year on Underground and Overground trains) are as striking as ever. You can see them all in their original designs, along with a full index, on the website here, where there are recordings of all the poems including Milton’s ‘On May Morning’, featured this month.

As the Guardian writes, ‘Transport for London has a long tradition of art and design. Poetry and art bring humanity underground. They allow nature and imagination into this subterranean labyrinth of civil engineering.’ It was wonderful to hear some of the poems read aloud by George and Imtiaz in the underground labyrinth of the University Library last week; and to know that this unique archive has been acquired by Cambridge University to keep safe for future generations. As Cicely Herbert writes in ‘Everything changes’:

What’s happened has happened

Poisons poured into the seas

cannot be drained out again, but

everything changes. We plant

trees for those born later.

More uplifting May things

• This past month I’ve been enjoying Margaret Busby’s Part of the Story: Writings from half a century (Hamish Hamilton, 2026), a collection of her published essays and articles. Busby first became famous as Britain’s youngest and first Black woman publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby in 1965. ‘Skin Deep’, the earliest essay in this book, was first published in the New Statesman in November 1966. A literary agent offered to represent her and the magazine offered her a regular column, but Margaret Busby had other plans. It was great to hear her discussing her life and work with and Samira Ahmed at the Cambridge Literary Festival last month.

  

• A few years ago I wrote in the TLS about the pernicious effect of the ‘Plath myth’ (see my post below) based on biographers who focussed on her death rather than her groundbreaking achievements as a poet. Now there’s a new edition of The Poems of Sylvia Plath from Faber, edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil. ‘Here, at last, is Sylvia Plath’ writes poetry critic in his excellent review for Prospect magazine. ‘The Poems of Sylvia Plath tells the story of her writing life rather than her overwritten death.’

• Also here on Substack this month, I’ve enjoyed ’s recent ‘Out and About’ post for news of enticing exhibitions coming up, all connected to women-centred history; on planning a twilight garden for an English summer; cheerful May thoughts from ; the artist on the merry month of May; and ’s uplifting post on cow parsley, new life for old patchworks and a beautiful poem by Robert Graves (perfect for Poems on the Underground) here.

• Continuing the flower theme, if you get the chance to visit Cambridge this summer, don’t miss the free exhibition ‘Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today, at Kettle’s Yard gallery until 6 September 2026. It features works by Vanessa Bell, Henri Rousseau, Winifred Nicholson and Tirzah Garwood as well as by contemporary artists such as Lubaina Himid, Jennifer Packer and Chris Ofili.

  

• And finally, I find myself coveting this item from the London Review of Books online store. The ‘Author Clock’ not only displays a literary quotation for every minute of the day, it also boasts ‘multiple unique quotes per minute, rotating over time’. It sounds, and looks, very appealing, but you might spend your entire day (and night) gazing at it.

• That’s it, thank you for reading! What books/films/other cultural events have you been enjoying this week? I’d love to know. And if there is a short poem that has stayed in your mind over the years, do share it with us! Next time I’ll be continuing with our reading of Elizabeth Jenkins’s Tortoise and the Hare, part of our Twentieth-Century Book Club series. Hope you’ll join us.

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This week’s post is my archive post about Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), the mother of Charles Darwin. I’m reposting it today on this second Sunday in May, when Mother’s Day is celebrated in many countries around the world.

On Mothering Sunday in the UK, gifts of flowers or plants are traditionally given to mothers by their children. The portrait above shows Charles Darwin at about eight years old, proudly holding a pot-plant that perhaps he had grown with the help of his mother. Susannah Darwin’s influence on her naturalist son is often overlooked by biographers, because – very sadly – she died not long after this portrait was painted. However, her vital presence was connected to some of his happiest childhood memories: being at her side in the family’s Shropshire garden, watching her close attention to plants and flowers and learning lessons from her about the importance of nature.

In September 1833, twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, staying at the home of the British merchant Edward Lumb, his wife Elizabeth, and their children. After almost two years of adventures on the HMS Beagle, followed by many months of travelling around South America, Charles felt suddenly homesick in this English-seeming home for the people and places he had left behind. ‘It is now the Spring of the year, & every thing is budding & fresh, but how great a difference between this & the beautiful scenes of England,’ he wrote to his older sister Caroline.

I often think of the Garden at home as a Paradise; on a fine summers evening, when the birds are singing how I should enjoy to appear, like a Ghost amongst you, whilst working with the flowers.— These are pleasures I have to view, through the long interval of the Pacific & Indian oceans.

Darwin’s ‘Garden at home’ was at The Mount, his family home near Shrewsbury in Shropshire, where Charles Darwin and his sisters grew up. This much-loved garden was a subtle but distinct presence throughout the great naturalist’s life. In The Ghost in the Garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden (2021) the academic and writer Jude Piesse explores the Shropshire garden’s ‘foundational’ influence on Darwin’s writings. ‘If a place can be said to follow a man, then the garden at The Mount followed Darwin to the last,’ she writes.

Pigeons and a garden paradise

Long before he explored the world for almost five years on the Beagle, the hours that Charles Darwin spent exploring his garden as a young boy helped to make him the naturalist he became. He and his sisters were brought up in rural Shropshire by their father Robert Darwin (1766–1848), a medical doctor, and their mother Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), a keen amateur botanist. Charles spent a happy early childhood in the garden climbing trees, fishing, collecting birds’ eggs and pebbles and playing with his sisters, and examining flowers and plants with his mother.

Susannah Darwin also happened to be a keen pigeon-breeder. Over forty years after her death, Darwin paid indirect tribute to her in The Origin of Species (1859), writing: ‘Few would readily believe in the natural capacity and years of practice requisite to become even a skilful pigeon-fancier.’ The birds she and her husband bred at The Mount were famous in the surrounding counties, and although Susannah referred to them in her correspondence as her ‘doves’, almost everyone else knew them as ‘The Mount pigeons’. There is little in science to distinguish between doves and pigeons.

Sadly, a deep shadow fell over the family’s life in 1817 when Susannah died after years of illness. ‘My mother died in July 1817, when I was a little over eight years old,’ Charles Darwin later wrote.

‘and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work table. I believe that my forgetfulness is partly due to my sisters, owing to their great grief, never being able to speak about her or mention her name; and partly to her previous invalid state.’

Although he had no conscious memory of his mother, Darwin’s former schoolmate W. A. Leighton recorded that it was Susannah who taught her young son ‘how by looking in the interior of a blossom he could ascertain the name of the plant.’ It’s likely that she was trying to teach Charles about Linnaean classification, and her insistence on the ‘close-up view’ of flowers and plants played a significant part in his scientific education. He would attend to such tiny yet crucial differences in plants and other species for the rest of his life.

A portrait of Susannah

In her excellent article in Ars Ceramica No. 30 (2018), ‘Susannah Wedgwood Darwin: A Portrait’, Professor Nancy H. Ramage gives a wonderfully vivid account of Susannah's life, sparked by her research into the miniature portrait of Susannah that was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2012. As Ramage writes in her article, Susannah Darwin ‘deserves our respect and admiration for being the strong character that she was in her own right, despite her lifelong struggle with ill health.’

It’s moving to discover that Charles Darwin did not see this beautiful miniature of his mother until 1881, just a year before he died. He was 76 years old when it was discovered amongst his late brother Erasmus’s possessions. At first he felt little connection to the tiny portrait, having no memory at all of his mother’s appearance, apart from the black velvet dress she wore.

Being a scientist, he depended on proof, not sentimentality and so he was doubtful that this was a true resemblance of Susannah, then aged 28, just before she married. ‘He had been unable to recall her face, and when he saw the likeness, he worried if it had been prettified by the artist,’ Ramage writes. ‘Charles turned to his older sister Caroline, who, nine years his senior, remembered their mother well. He inquired if it really looked like her, and was reassured that it did. He was much moved, and treasured the portrait.’

There is a portrait of Charles Darwin aged 31, at about the same age that Susannah’s portrait was painted. I think he looks very like his mother; when he saw the miniature portrait, he might have remembered his own face as a young man.

Loving a ghost

Reading about Susannah Darwin this week, I was reminded of something that the 20th-century philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote. His own mother died when he was just two years old, and in the second volume of his Autobiography (1968) he describes how, although he could not remember his mother, he gradually became aware that her presence had never left him:

‘I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has become spectral. I have therefore buried it deeper and deeper beneath layers of cheerfulness, affection and joy of life.’

Although she did not live to see her youngest son’s great achievements, Susannah Wedgwood Darwin remained as a presence in his life and work. Years later, Charles Darwin would re-create elements of the garden at The Mount at his own family home, Down House in Kent. There was a ‘Sandwalk’ path for meditative walking, a pigeon loft, and much else; this garden was both a living laboratory for his plant and insect experiments, and a place that his own children could explore and enjoy, and where his mother Susannah was a familiar ghost.

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Sources

To read Darwin’s 1833 letter and many others free online, visit the Darwin Correspondence Project. A detailed artist’s map of the garden at The Mount can be seen at the Cambridge University Library website here, with an illustration of how the garden looked in 1867, featuring plants grown from seeds brought back on HMS Beagle by Charles Darwin from South America in 1836. After publishing The Garden Diary of Doctor Darwin (Unicorn, 2021), pictured above, the author Susan Campbell generously donated the manuscripts of Robert and his sister Susan Darwin’s garden journals to Cambridge University Library. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882, edited by Nora Barlow (unexpurgated 1958 edition). Nancy H. Ramage, “Susannah Wedgwood Darwin: A Portrait,” Ars Ceramica No. 30 (2014, published 2018) pp. 3-11. In this short film ‘Darwin’s mother and the miniature’, Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes movingly explains why seeing this miniature of his mother for the first time was so significant for the great naturalist, late in life. The 2024 symposium ‘Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories’ held in at Darwin House (previously The Mount) in Shrewsbury, discussed her ‘as a historically important figure in her own right rather than someone to be viewed in exclusive connection with male lineages and contexts’.

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We’ve just had the early spring Bank Holiday weekend here, and I’ve been making the most of a short break on the lovely North Antrim coast (yesterday I sent some of you an ‘email postcard’ with this seaside snap of me above. I meant to send it to you all – so here it is again, in case you missed it).

This week’s post introduces the opening chapters of Elizabeth Jenkins’s most famous novel, The Tortoise and the Hare (1954). It’s the latest episode in my 20th-century book club series: literary posts for paid subscribers about mid-century British and Irish novels by women writers. You can find my introduction to Elizabeth Jenkins’s life and work in Part 1 below (with no spoilers about the ending just yet, in case you’d like to catch up with us before Part 3).

Elizabeth Jenkins is still not as well known as other early/mid-century English/Irish writers called Elizabeth: Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jane Howard or Elizabeth Taylor, but I think that she should be. As says here, a proper biography of her is long overdue, as well as reissues of many of her other novels (‘What are the publishers waiting for?’). I hope this post will begin to explain what’s so great about her, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

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(I have edited this post to include a link to Adrian Barlow’s blogpost and a fascinating Substack Note about the commemorative bronze plaque at 84, Charing Cross Road from ).

A letter from America

Although the letter I’m highlighting this month was posted from New York in April 1950, it definitely has a Cambridge connection. It’s from the much-loved 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, first published in the UK in 1971. It tells the story of how, in October 1949, the scriptwriter Hanff wrote to the London antiquarian booksellers Marks & Co. with a list of out-of-print books she badly wanted to buy, as long as they were in good condition and less than five dollars each. For the next 20 years the bookshop’s manager Frank Doel did his best to find the books she asked for, she wrote funny and at times excoriating letters back, and over the years the two struck up a warm epistolatory friendship. As time went on, this included Doel’s wife and daughters as well as the bookshop’s staff, to whom Hanff regularly sent parcels of food that was rationed in postwar England, and nylon stockings.

Early on, Hanff’s requests for rare editions of poetry, essays and books by Cardinal Newman and John Donne convinced the staff that she must be a highbrow scholar. Hanff was keen to put them straight (‘I’m so unstudious I never even went to college’) explaining that she was a freelance writer, struggling to make ends meet, and living in a rented bedsit.

14 East 95th Street, April 10, 1950

‘…I just happen to have peculiar taste in books, thanks to a Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch, known as Q, whom I fell over in a library when I was 17. And I’m about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler. I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks, they don’t give us any heat here in the daytime. It’s a 5-story brownstone and all the other tenants go out to work at 9am and don’t come home until 6 – and why should the landlord heat the building for one small script-reader/writer working at home on the ground floor?’

What was the Cambridge connection in all this? Well, as she says above, the book that the teenage Hanff stumbled across as a teenager was On the Art of Writing, first published in 1916. Its author was the distinguished Professor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (who incidentally also coined the phrase ‘murder your darlings’, as I wrote here). Many of his books were based on his English lectures to Cambridge University students, where, it has been said, he refused to acknowledge women in the audience by beginning each lecture with the word ‘Gentlemen’.

So I was glad to come across this article by Jane Prince ‘Helene Hanff and Q’s Legacy’, setting the record straight (and incidentally also mentioning Hanff’s visit to Cambridge to meet Q’s widow Muriel Brittain in 1978, which I hadn’t previously known about). It’s well worth reading in full, but I’ll just quote this bit. ‘The famous cartoon ‘Gentlemen’ published in The Cambridge Magazine on 2 May 1914, which depicts Q addressing a lecture hall comprised almost entirely of females as ‘Gentlemen’, was probably partly responsible for his reputation for misogyny’, Prince writes.

‘F. Brittain, his biographer, and one of the people who knew him best, confirms that it was this practice which first gave rise to the legend. He states: “If it had been so, he could have refused admission to all women other than the members of Girton and Newnham Colleges, but he did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he admitted everyone who cared to attend, whether they were men or women, and he frequently did this against the wishes of the administrative staff of the University, whose duty it was to see that outsiders did not attend lectures without special permission. He also admitted women as freely as men to his informal evening discussions [which he was not obliged to do].” (Frederick Brittain, Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Biographical Study of Q, 1947, pp. 65-66).

You can find out more about Q, Cambridge and Cornwall in the author and English literature specialist Adrian Barlow’s delightful blogpost here.

84 Charing Cross Road, and its sequels

Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that most recent-ish UK editions of 84 Charing Cross Road (my secondhand copy is from Cambridge’s Amnesty bookshop and was published in 1976) also include Hanff’s 1974 memoir The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. It’s about her long-deferred trip to London when her book was published in 1971, and how at last she explores the places connected to the literature she loved. Well worth requesting from your own local secondhand bookshop.

There was a lovely article a few years ago about Helene Hanff in The Oldie magazine by Valerie Grove; you can find it here. Now a distinguished biographer, Grove was formerly a journalist who features briefly in 84 Charing Cross Road as what Hanff describes as a ‘bouncy girl reporter’. She accompanied Hanff to the bookshop she had long dreamed of visiting: Marks & Co. In her article, Grove describes her own memory of the occasion.

‘The day before the book’s British publication, in June 1971, I went by cab with Ms Hanff to Charing Cross Road. Number 84 was, as we had been warned, padlocked. Frank Doel had died from peritonitis in 1968, and the owners, Messrs Marks and Cohen, had sold the shop for redevelopment. It had closed six months before.

It was a poignant moment. Ms Hanff had so often promised Frank Doel she would come to London as soon as she could afford the trip. Peering through the letter box, we saw only dusty floorboards and piled-up mail.’

Grove describes how, ten years later, Hanff returned to London in 1981 and went once again to the site of Marks and Co. (now a MacDonald’s) where a commemorative bronze plaque had been installed in honour of the bookshop she had made world-famous. “Imagine it,” she said. “That a plaque should go up on a London building, just because I wrote letters to it. And I never even went to college!”

*Shortly after publishing this post I was delighted to receive this note, with a glimpse of the bronze plaque to Marks & Co., from the writer . She has written the introduction to Underfoot in Show Business, Helene Hanff’s memoir newly published by Manderley Press, and will be introducing it at Foyles next month (see below for more information and a link to book tickets).

Celebrating 84, Charing Cross Road

On 16 May there’s an event at Foyles bookshop (appropriately situated at 107 Charing Cross Road, London) to mark the 55th anniversary of 84, Charing Cross Road being published in the UK. There will be a discussion with and about the life and works of Hanff as well as the continued relevance of, and interest in, her most famous work, some five decades after its initial publication. Tickets for ‘Helene Hanff and 84, Charing Cross Road: A Celebration’ are available here.

I was delighted to receive this comment last week from .

‘I was the paperback reprint editor for 84 Charing Cross Road when it came out in 1986, and I devoted myself to finding every bit of writing produced by Hanff during the course of her lifetime. I adored her then and I adore her now.’

More diary dates

Another bookish date for your diary is an event called ‘Why Bowen Matters’ on 6 June, which takes place in Dublin and will also be live-streamed on the day. The Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen is celebrated for her short stories and novels including The Death of the Heart. Previously I’ve written about her friendship with the English writer Elizabeth Taylor, and Bowen also features in a memoir by another mid-century writer, Elizabeth Jenkins. More on this soon.

20th century Book Club, coming soon

We’ll be reading The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, first published in 1956. In her memoir, The View from Downshire Hill, Jenkins reflects on how the novel was perceived by certain critics as being about the problems of a privileged set of people.

‘This was, in terms of financial success, my best novel, but I encountered some severe, personal criticism from readers who felt that the interest of the book was too much confined to one class, not to say one income bracket. I was told by a young man, a student in a university society to which I had been asked to give a talk, that what was wrong with the book was that it wasn’t about anything that really mattered. As I felt that the suffering caused by the break-up of a marriage was something that did matter, I asked him, in surprise, what were some of the things that really mattered? After a pause, he said: “Well, trade unions.”’

Five Substacks I’ve enjoyed this week

• ‘The moon wanes and the wild goose flies high’ on the life and work of Japanese writer Fumiko Hayashi.

• There is so much treasure to be found in ’s series ‘Me and My Desk’. The most recent features , and I love his description of his dog Harris, who ‘moves a fleece around the floor so that he may always lie in a rhombus of sunshine.’

• whets our appetite the forthcoming Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize, and suggests 25 books that you should, in an ideal world, read before you’re 25. Let’s hope The Guardian features a ‘never-too-late’ list soon, or even books that are most enjoyed when you’re over 50.

• ’s delightful gathering-up of distractions this April

• And finally, Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road pops up in this round-up of novels, old and new, chosen by , who was inspired by the recent success of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. ‘The epistolary novel is indeed an old-fashioned form (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example), and yet somehow it keeps on going, even in our fragmented 21st century.’

That’s it for this week. I would love to hear what you think about any of the books mentioned here, or others you would recommend. As ever, thank you for reading and I hope you’re getting some sunshine, wherever you are.

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Speaking of being out in nature, here’s the second part of my introduction to the Olivier sisters, beginning with a letter that the poet Rupert Brooke wrote to the youngest, Noel (who was still a schoolgirl) about his idyllic life in the village of Grantchester. Her reply wasn’t quite what he was expecting… and years later Virginia Woolf asked her why she hadn’t married Brooke. I’ll be giving a talk about Woolf, Brooke and his ‘neo-pagan’ circle for this summer, and you can find more details about the course here.

If you’d like to read on, and support my work, you can subscribe below at a special rate this week. Our next 20th-century book club, The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) by Elizabeth Jenkins, is coming soon. I hope you’ll join us.

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My own talk ‘Sleeping on the ground and swimming in a river: Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagans’ will be about the ‘Neo-Pagan’ circle that gathered around Rupert Brooke from 1908 to 1912, and its lasting legacy. Today I’m introducing the four Olivier sisters. ‘If Rupert conceived and developed the closest thing to a Neo-Pagan ideology,’ writes their biographer Sarah Watling, ‘the Oliviers were the driving force behind the outdoor gatherings for which the group became known.’ (More about her book, Noble Savages, in my next post.)

Read on for a glimpse of the group on one memorable outing in 1911.

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Hello, and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week’s edition is mostly a dispatch from London, where last week I was honoured to be invited to St Paul’s Cathedral to give a talk about the historian and social activist Louise Creighton to mark International Women’s Day 2026. After my talk, it was a thrill to have the opportunity to visit a library designed by Christopher Wren, tucked away on the Triforium (gallery) level, that previously I had known nothing about. Because I’ve included quite a few photos of the library and other archive treasures in this post, your email provider might truncate it, so do click here to read in full via my website.

I arrived in busy Ludgate Hill early by train and, given the mild spring sunshine, decided to have my lunch outdoors at the aptly named café in the photo below. There were lots of office workers strolling past on their lunch break, a pensive-looking builder sitting on a block of stone and French teenagers everywhere, laughing and taking photogenic snaps of each other with St Paul’s dome as a backdrop. More worryingly for me, a rather tough-looking gang of London pigeons was demolishing leftovers on a table nearby. I feared they might be coming for my baguette for their next course, so decided to descend the steps opposite to the peace and safety of the St Paul’s Crypt.

Pigeons and St Paul’s

It’s a cool, calm space down there, with a pigeon-free café and impressive tombs, statues and memorial stones everywhere you look, including Admiral Lord Nelson’s elaborate marble sarcophagus directly beneath the dome and the effigies of a Tudor couple. Amongst all this, you might not even notice the simply inscribed slab of black marble that marks the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren, ‘the Builder of this Cathedral Church of St Paul’s’. On a wall nearby there’s a plaque with a later dedication by Wren’s son that includes the famous words: ‘Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ (‘Reader, if you seek a monument, look about you’). You can see photo of this here.

At the entrance to the OBE chapel, there’s also a beautiful ledger stone marking the tomb of Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London from 1897 to 1901 and his wife Louise Creighton, whose ashes were added to the tomb following her death in 1936. This ‘Art Deco’ memorial stone was designed by James Powell and sons with help from Louise who, in the midst of her grief, suggested something similar to the black and white designs of the cathedral in Siena (a place she and Mandell loved). It was Louise who chose the line ‘Love is all and death is nought’ which is by Robert Browning, apparently, though I haven’t yet identified which poem it’s from.

In the end, the stonemason chose this ochre marble to depict the Bishop’s cope (ceremonial cloak) and the surrounding frame, see below. I think the colour works beautifully with the warm tones of the Crypt’s stone floor.

Amazingly, the real object was on display during my talk, in the circular room called, delightfully, ‘the beehive’. You can see my photo of it below. It’s made of red and gold silk with golden Japanese thread, and was made from material intended to be used for the coronation robe of Victoria, Princess Royal when she became German Empress and Queen of Prussia in 1888. But sadly, her husband died before the coronation took place, so instead it was made into a cope for the Bishop of London. Mandell Creighton wore it in 1897 for the St Paul’s service celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. As he stood with the Archbishops on the steps of St Paul’s to welcome the Queen in her carriage, an awestruck reporter from the Daily Chronicle reported ‘His cope was of a stuff that taxes possibility of description… upon his head he wore a skull-cap of pure cloth of gold.’ When Queen Victoria later wrote to thank Mandell, she told him she had worried about him overheating in the sunshine.

Louise Creighton

I’ve written here about Louise Creighton’s work as a public historian, and how three of her books were exhibited with books by Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and George Eliot at the specially constructed ‘Women’s Building Library’ in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. There’s more about her early life and how in 1890, with her friend Kathleen Lyttelton, she founded the Cambridge intellectual discussion club, the Ladies’ Dining Society, here. Reading her memoir again last week, I liked her refreshing honesty about how her crush on the writings of John Ruskin (‘I was… inclined to make Ruskin my prophet’) made her snobbish about any architecture that was not to his taste. ‘It is strange to me now to think that never before my marriage had I ever been inside Saint Paul’s nor dreamt that there could be anything to be said for city churches.’ (Memoir, p. 92)

When her husband became Bishop of Peterborough in 1891, then Bishop of London from 1897, there was little time for Louise to continue with her own historical writing. ‘I think my mind, such as it was, was a student’s mind’ she later wrote. ‘I loved hunting up information and following out obscure points. If I had had the training, and the time and opportunity, I believe I would have loved to do research work.’ (quoted in Covert, 2000, p. 304). I wondered, reading this, if she managed occasionally to escape from her duties and spend time in the hidden library of St Paul’s, which I visited for the first time after giving my talk last week. It’s an astonishing place, and I’m pleased to report that Louise Creighton’s Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton is on the shelves there.

On the Triforium

Carrying an armful of books, the organizer kindly led me up Wren’s ingenious cantilevered spiral ‘Geometric stair’ (there are some lovely photos of it here). We arrived on the Triforium, or interior gallery level, where, after carefully stepping over pipes and squeezing through a stone passageway, I looked up to see a mosaic ceiling that was as intricately decorated as Mandell Creighton’s cope (see my photo at the top). Just audible in that cool shady corridor was the sound of a choir practising on the cathedral floor far below. After going through a set of double oak doors I found myself in one of the best preserved eighteenth-century interiors in London, which – remarkably – has been kept in service since it opened in 1709 until it was closed for the four-year restoration project which began in 2018.

On the St Paul’s website here there is fascinating information about this, along with the history of how the library’s collection was put back together after the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed the medieval cathedral that had originally stood on this site. It had long been falling into disrepair when the young physicist and astronomer, Christopher Wren, who had designed Oxford’s Sheldonian theatre in 1662, was asked for his ideas on how to rebuild St Paul’s. As part of his research, Wren travelled to Paris to consider the designs that inspired the Louvre museum and the domed churches of the city. In the spring of 1666 he submitted his plan for the dome of St Paul’s and on 27 August it was accepted. Less than one week later, on 2 September 1666, a fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane and the ensuing conflagration destroyed much of the City of London including the old St Paul’s. It was thought that its thick stone walls would protect it, but in preparation for its planned restoration wooden scaffolding had been placed around the church, and the library’s entire collection of priceless books and manuscripts was lost.

Within days, Wren visited the site to view the devastation for himself, and drew up new plans for rebuilding the City. He also began work on his ideas for a completely new St Paul’s, with a dome, based on his interpretation of the European tradition of classicism. His plan was accepted in 1675, and building work began soon afterwards which was completed just 35 years later in 1710. Among his other projects at the time, including helping to rebuild London churches, Wren was also designing a new library for Trinity College Cambridge, which was built from 1676 until 1684 and is now famous as the Wren Library. Perhaps it was work on this that made him consider what sort of library he wanted for St Paul’s, as a place for a library to begin again. By 1710, the Library chamber was already being restocked with priceless texts, including one of only three surviving copies world-wide of Tyndale’s New Testament (1526). It was the first ever holy book to be printed in English, but viewed as heretical by the then Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall. He ordered copies of it to be bought up and burned in the yard of St Paul’s Cathedral itself. After Wren’s library opened, a copy of it was smuggled in, its pages inserted inside another book, to keep it safe; there’s a very good History Today article about it here.

Wren’s hidden library

It’s moving to think about how in 1710, even after all the destruction of fire and the deliberate book-burning of the past, there was a chance to start afresh. I love discovering how historic libraries began to build their collections, and it’s moving to think about how Wren, who studied and taught at Oxford and had just built a beautiful new library in Cambridge, was thinking about the importance of books in his design for his hidden library in St Paul’s. This compact library isn’t there to impress us with its grandeur and it isn’t reserved for Oxbridge students and scholars. Rather, it is a peaceful space, tucked away on the cathedral’s Triforium. It’s just far enough away from the streets outside and the business of a working cathedral for a reader to come in, find a quiet corner and open a book. I like to imagine that Christopher Wren wanted others to experience the tranquillity of studying in this beautiful place, as he had enjoyed his own studies years earlier.

Below there are some of my photos from my recent visit… and read on to find out how to book your own visit there. My thanks to the staff of St Paul’s for kindly inviting me to give a talk, and for looking after me so well.

(You can find out more about the recent restoration on St Paul’s website here. The Library at St Paul’s Cathedral is open to readers by appointment, 10am-4pm, Tuesday to Thursday. For enquiries relating to the Library materials, including individual reader visits, please contact the Librarian. To visit the room with a guide, please book a triforium tour in addition to a sightseeing ticket).

Further reading

‘Christopher Wren 1632–1723’ in Encyclopedia Britannica; The Hidden Rooms Of St Paul’s Cathedral; J. T. Covert, A Victorian marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton (Hambledon, 2000); Louise Creighton, Memoir of a Victorian woman: reflections of Louise Creighton, 1850–1936, ed. J. T. Covert (Indiana U.P., 1994); Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (HarperCollins, 2003); Adrian Tinniswood, His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren (Pimlico, 2002).

Coincidentally, this article has just been published in History Today, April 2026: ‘Good News: The Afterlife of Tyndale’s Bible’.

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Hello, and best wishes for International Women’s Day 2026. One of the things I particularly like to celebrate in my research and writing about women’s lives at the turn of the century is their network of friendships, and how opened doors to other connections and opportunities. This week features a brief introduction to Pernel Strachey (1876-1951) particularly in her connection to two women writers: Virginia Woolf and the aspiring novelist and biographer Elizabeth Jenkins. Read on to find about a literary podcast I took part in last week about another Newnhamite, Jane Harrison, and news of our next Twentieth-Century Book Club choice.

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It’s been spring-like weather this week here in Cambridge, and I enjoyed a brief outing this weekend past, travelling eastward to the Norfolk coast. Walking with my dog along the wide, almost empty and softly windblown beach of Wells-next-the-sea was such a treat.

I came home (reluctantly) to good news: that a book I’ve contributed a chapter to, From Darwin to Cornford: The Evolution of the Poet Frances Cornford, now has a publication date. It will be published by the academic publisher, Brill, on July 16, 2026 in the UK, and you can find out more details here. (Being an academic book, the price is rather eye-watering at the moment, but fingers crossed there will be a paperback version in due course.) Other contributing authors include Frances Spalding, Janet Browne, Eugene Paykel and , and I am honoured to be in such company.

Here’s what the book’s editors, Jane Firman and Peter Mabey, say about it:

‘This study presents the first sustained account of the life and work of the poet Frances Cornford (1886–1960). Scholars from across disciplines reveal her journey, as she navigated the scientific inheritance of her grandfather Charles Darwin, the patriarchal world of the University of Cambridge, and the demands of dominant poetry movements, through times of personal loss and depression. The volume brings renewed attention to Frances’s poetry from across her career, draws on previously-unseen manuscripts and photographs, and curates her memoir. Frances became a widely-read poet, winning the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1959.’

The distinguished historian Peter Stansky, author of Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War (2012), has been kind enough to praise the book in advance.

‘A stellar group of highly accomplished authors has been assembled to write about Frances Cornford… This book will make her deservedly more recognised, as a wonderful poet; but it also provides important insights into English intellectual and literary “aristocracy”, through the study of her life as a Darwin, as a close friend of Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagan circle, and as Francis Cornford's wife. It is also an important personal story, sadly because of her periods of deep depression, more positively as she moves from atheism to deep religiosity.’

‘No omnibus heart’

I’m honoured to have contributed a biographical chapter about Frances Cornford’s mother to the book. My chapter is called ‘“No omnibus heart”: Ellen Wordsworth Darwin (1856-1903)’ and it will throw light, I hope, on Ellen Wordsworth Darwin as a hard-working Cambridge lecturer of English literature, as well as a witty friend and warm and loving mother to Frances and her step-brother Bernard.

The threads that connected Frances and Ellen were many, including their shared love of poetry, their remarkable creative focus and the quirky verbal humour that they both enjoyed, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it was Ellen’s influence that helped to make Frances Cornford the remarkable poet she became. I’ve previously written about Ellen’s friendship with the poet Amy Levy here, and my post about Frances Cornford’s cousin Gwen Raverat, who illustrated her collection of poetry Spring Morning, first published in 1915, here.

It seems fitting, following my walk in the ‘wind-soft’ air on a Norfolk beach, to conclude with this poem by Frances Cornford. Thanks very much for reading, and I would love to hear about any poems about the sea, sailing or being by the coast that have stayed in your mind over the years.

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The Coast: Norfolk

by Frances Cornford

As on the highway’s quiet edge
He mows the grass beside the hedge,
The old man has for company
The distant, grey, salt-smelling sea,
A poppied field, a cow and calf,
The finches on the telegraph.

Across his faded back a hone,
He slowly, slowly scythes alone
In silence of the wind-soft air,
With ladies’ bedstraw everywhere,
With whitened corn, and tarry poles,
And far-off gulls like risen souls.

Hello, and a warm welcome to this week’s Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Here’s my question. Have you read any good history books recently, enjoyed a historical podcast or visited a memorable place that has been preserved for centuries?

I was lucky enough to have a look around St Paul’s Cathedral in London recently, having been invited to give a talk in the Wren Suite there, on 9 March. The title is ‘Louise Creighton: A pioneer of women’s rights and education’ and you can find more information about it here. It’s an event to mark International Women’s Day 2026, so please forgive my tongue-in-cheek reference, above, to the remarkable Louise Creighton as ‘the Bishop’s wife.’ There was so much more to her than that, and I’m discovering new things all the time. This post is a brief introduction to her pioneering career as an author and public historian.

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Helen Muspratt’s archive has recently been acquired by Oxford University, ensuring her future reputation as a groundbreaking photographer, but Lettice Ramsey’s contribution to their pioneering partnership during the 1930s, as well as her career as a professional photographer in Cambridge, is less well known. So here is my biographic snapshot of Lettice Ramsey.

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Who can resist a love letter? This month’s Cambridge letter celebrates love letters in different forms, from a new exhibition in the National Archives to a letter from a young researcher in the 1920s, setting out all the reasons why she shouldn’t marry a Cambridge don. Amidst all the bad news out there, did you know that the fourth Wednesday of January every year is ‘Library Shelfie Day’? It’s a celebration that was instigated by the New York Public Library in 2014 to encourage a love of reading by asking the public to share their photographs of books, libraries and librarians. Below is a recent glimpse of my home library, or rather one small corner of it, containing some of the books I refer to most. How do you arrange your own books, and did a librarian or library inspire you when you were younger? I’d love to hear your stories!

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Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This week I’ve been sorting through my previous posts on literature, and updating some of my personal favourites based on research into writers whose works I love. This one is about E.M. Forster, author of A Room With A View (1908) and Howards End (1910), among other classics, and my quest to find a missing mantelpiece designed by his architect father.

Coincidentally, I’m delighted to be able to report the good news that this month, Donna Ferguson in the Observer newspaper has written about how a missing nameplate from Forster’s door – stolen by a student as a ‘prank’ following the author’s death 56 years ago – has recently been returned to King’s College and will be reinstalled to commemorate his set of rooms.

In a black-and-white 1958 BBC Monitor documentary, the camera pans over a murky King’s College. ‘Cambridge’, says the voice of E. M. Forster, ‘is a place for the very young and the very old.’ And, he might have added, for tourists of all ages, all year round. There were not many of them about on a recent wet Wednesday afternoon, however. On King’s Parade, a young man in a red anorak stands in the rain, optimistically twirling a board. ‘Fancy a punt trip today? Half-price?’ At the entrance to King’s, a morose porter was checking the tickets of the handful of visitors to the Chapel. I had an appointment to see E. M. Forster’s former ­college rooms, which are not on the tourist trail. They are now the postgraduate students’ common room (known as the ‘Grad Suite’) at King’s, and a student had agreed to show me round.

Forster was sixty-seven when he returned to Cambridge in the autumn of 1946, having being made an honorary fellow by King’s ­College. He was grateful for the offer of a large study ‘in’, with lodgings nearby – after his mother’s death he had nowhere else to live – but unenthusiastic about moving. There were some small comforts to be drawn from the prospect of having his former classics tutor Nathaniel Wedd’s room in ‘A’ staircase, where he had first been encouraged to write.

He was also pleased to have his more important belongings about him. ‘The mantelpiece which my father designed in 1876 is already there’, he told his friend, the Belfast writer Forrest Reid in 1947, ‘and when it is up I shall sit down in front of it, as I have done ever since babyhood, and shall think, “What next?”’

From the moment that he moved back to King’s, Forster was treated as a cherished guest and something of a tourist attraction ­himself. Students and college fellows dropped into his room for a chat; lectures and dinners were held in his honour. He moved permanently into college in 1953, in a set of two rooms with a view of front square, and was the first subject for the celebrated series ‘The Art of Fiction’ in the Paris Review. Its editor George Plimpton was a former King’s student, as was P. N. Furbank, the interviewer, who described Forster’s room as ‘furnished in the Edwardian taste’, with a profusion of books and letters, faded armchairs draped with knitted shawls, portraits on the walls and - curiously - a pair of slippers in the waste-basket.

Furbank noted the ‘massive carved wooden mantelpiece of elaborate ­structure’, but didn’t ask about it. Instead he wondered if any real people had inspired Forster’s fictional characters, even though he had not published a novel since A Passage to India in 1924. Forster obligingly listed a few family members and acquaintances, then added (was he pulling his interviewer’s leg?) ‘I have used several tourists’.

Towards the end of his two-volume biography E.M. Forster: A Life (1977-78), Furbank described his 1953 visit again, this time in more detail. ‘The first thing that caught one’s eye’, he recalled, ‘was the mantelpiece, designed by his father, an elaborate oaken structure with blue china in its niches and, on the topmost shelf, some vases and three beaten copper platters’.

‘The “Rooksnest mantelpiece”’ Forster wrote from King’s in 1947, ‘has followed us to Tonbridge, to Tunbridge Wells, has been stored, followed us to Weybridge and West Hackhurst, and now stands, more effective than ever, in its last home.’ It was built by his father, Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, known as Eddie, a vicar’s son from Essex who in the early 1870s trained under the leading Victorian church architect Sir Arthur Blomfield in London. Thomas Hardy had been a trainee there a few years previously (see ’s post here), and later Hardy and E.M. Forster became friends.

‘It is one of Life’s Little ­Ironies’, EM Forster wrote in 1956, ‘that I should have got to know Mr Hardy and stayed with him at Max Gate, and should never have known my father, seven years his junior.’ Although the architectural historian Nikolas Pevsner was dismissive of Blomfield’s tendency to add ‘a wished-for look of the Middle Ages’ to Victorian buildings that were nothing of the kind, Blomfield’s interpretation of Gothic style rubbed off on his pupil Eddie Forster.

Eddie’s tastes were also influenced by his frequent trips to Italy, where he sketched churches and other buildings in between stints of working for Blomfield. In May 1876 he was appointed a member of the R.I.B.A. and was hoping to get his first independent commission. While waiting, he built a mantelpiece as a gift for his cousin’s widow, Maimie Synnot, who had recently moved to Clapham. It was a chance for Eddie to practise his skills and add some Tuscan medieval gravitas to a modern suburban house.

In September of that year he was commissioned to build a cottage for his sister Laura Forster at Abinger in Surrey, and in November he became engaged to Lily Whichelo (his aunt Marianne Thornton’s protégée) who was then working as a governess in London. Eddie and Lily married in January 1877, and their son Edward Morgan, always known as Morgan, was born in 1879.

But Eddie was often ill, and on 31st October 1880 he died of tuberculosis, aged just thirty-two. Grief, and the relentless attention of kindly but interfering aunts, made Lily take her small son and flee to ‘Rooksnest’, a pretty cottage in rural Hertfordshire. The mantelpiece that Eddie built (he called it a fireplace) was Maimie Synnot’s house-warming gift to her friend Lily, who had it installed there.

Aged four, E.M. Forster fell instantly in love with Rooksnest, and his sadness at having to leave it when he was fourteen would inspire him, years later, to write Howards End (1910). But something tangible from that house remained with him and his mother. His father’s mantelpiece moved with him and Lily to each of their subsequent, less-loved homes, and in 1925 it was installed in the dining room of West Hackhurst, the cottage his father built in 1876, when Forster inherited the lease from his father’s sister Laura Forster. It would be, he assumed, his final home.

Forster lived there with Lily until her death in 1945. Living with his mother - who seems to have suffered from severe, undiagnosed depression - made him bitterly resentful at times. On November 1st 1911 he recorded his feelings of frustration in the ‘locked diary’ he had inherited from his father. ‘Last night, alone, I had a Satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault finding,’ he wrote, ‘and figured a scene in which I swept the mantlepiece with my arm and then rushed out of doors or cut my throat.’ On the back of the page he noted: ‘Discover, some months later, that Oct 31st is the anniversary of my father's death’. Only connect, as Forster himself might have said: the imposing, ever-present mantelpiece was a constant reminder of the absent father who, by dying, had abandoned him to a lifetime with an unhappy mother.

When Lily died aged ninety in 1945, Forster was desolate, all the more so when the landlord refused to renew the lease of West Hackhurst. At the age of 67 he was homeless, until to his great surprise his former college, King’s, offered him an honorary fellowship and a room of his own for life. The death of his mother and loss of West Hackhurst had, in fact, set him free, and after moving back to Cambridge he gave up his idea of having ancestral ‘roots in the land’, as he put it in the closing pages of his domestic biography, Marianne Thornton (1956) (I wrote about his final published book here).

Seventy years later, I walked through a rainy Front Court with a sense of trepidation. From the outside, King’s College Cambridge looks much the same as it did in Forster’s time, but I knew that extensive renovations had gone on inside the building where he lived. There’s a student bar on the ground floor now, and a new staircase. Was Forster’s mantelpiece still there? No one seemed to know.

My friendly student guide, Maria, admitted me to a large, high-ceilinged room upstairs. Though empty, signs of student life were everywhere: battered sofas, posters on the walls, a fussball table, a large television and a shelf of DVDs. And there, taking up most of the far wall, was the mantelpiece. It looked very tall and austere in this setting, and its panelled oak had been painted a glutinous dark brown. Maria helpfully removed a Harry Potter pennant so that I could see the 1930s green tiled hearth, which Lily must have added. Propped on the top shelf, beside a vase of dried flowers, was a framed copy of Eddie’s original drawing of his mantelpiece. It was still a solid and dignified presence in this room, despite the Playstation padlocked to one of its delicately carved columns.

In the 1958 BBC documentary, E.M. Forster comes into his sitting-room, walks over to a little table, sits down and takes out his pen. His writing desk is not by the window, as it is in the photograph above, overlooking the courtyard of King’s. Instead, perhaps to show its importance for the film, the table has been placed directly opposite his father’s mantelpiece, where a fire glows in the tiled grate. The camera pans over the china plates displayed in the Tuscan niches, and Forster looks up from the letter he is writing and smiles. This was his room with a view.

Thank you for reading this, a lightly edited version of an essay first published in the TLS, July 28, 2017. I am grateful to my editors there and to the college archivists at King’s College Cambridge for their assistance. Here’s my photograph of E.M. Forster’s mantelpiece in its current state, below. The original varnished oak has been covered with a less than attractive coat of dark brown paint. If you look carefully, you can see a copy of his father’s original architectural sketch on the top right. Long may this mantelpiece, a precious lifelong symbol of home for Forster, remain in the college that he loved.

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• I would love to hear what you think about finding a home that you love, or other major changes you’ve made in later life. Below is another snap I took last week, with the spires of King’s College Chapel outlined against a bright blue sky. Autumn sunshine at last reached this cloudy corner of the UK, and it was cheering to see these candy-striped stall covers that morning.

• Forster’s relationship with his mother is beautifully described in ‘E.M. Forster: Life Before Bloomsbury’ by , and I’m grateful to for alerting me to the ‘feminism, literature, and rock’n’roll’ of St Pancras Gardens, including the much-missed Hardy Tree. I was also delighted to feature in his lovely post, 100 more reasons to be cheerful.

• It was very touching to get so many lovely messages and new subscribers following my ‘First Year on Substack’ post last week. Thank you all very much, and a warm welcome to the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society community.

• I loved taking part in ’s podcast this week, chatting about creative niches and the joy of research. I hope you’ll tune in, and subscribe to her excellent Substack too.

• And finally, if you enjoyed this post about E.M. Forster, you might like this one, below, that I wrote about his great-aunt Marianne Thornton. It was thanks to her generosity that he was able to become a writer, and he paid tribute to her in his last published book.

‘Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’

Virginia Woolf’s glorious declaration of intellectual freedom in A Room of One’s Own (1929) was written after she was turned away from the library at Trinity College Cambridge. Long before Cambridge University’s first two colleges for women were established in the 1870s, there were women readers who used the old University Library (nowadays usually referred to as ‘the U.L.’, and housed in Gilbert Scott’s glorious, light-filled 1934 building, see above). Non-university members who held U.L. readers’ cards included Frances Harriet Hooker, one of the daughters of Joseph Stevens Henslow, a Cambridge professor who had taught Charles Darwin in the 1820s. After Frances married Joseph Hooker, her research work continued at the library and her translation of Maout and Decaisnes’ A General System of Botany, Descriptive and Analytical from French into English was published in 1873. It can be consulted today in the U.L.’s Rare Books Reading Room (MD.40.65).

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Hello, and welcome to part 3 of my series on the mid-century English writer, Elizabeth Taylor and her first published novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945). (You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.) This week’s concluding post will focus on the acerbic humour that runs through this novel, and the depiction of her main characters: Julia, Roddy, Eleanor and Oliver. Elizabeth Taylor’s writing provides a subversive commentary on middle-class marriage and domestic life, and how pressures associated with the Second World War affect men and women in different ways. There’s more about Taylor’s writing life after At Mrs Lippincote’s below, plus a reading list for further reading. This is an extra post for paid subscribers to our 20th-century book club, with thanks for all your wonderful comments (some of which I include below).

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Hello, and a warm welcome (on this first day of winter snow) to the first Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society newsletter of 2026. I hope you enjoyed the festive period, I had a delightful holiday with family in Scotland and JUST missed the proper snowfall there. A New Year means new projects… so here it is, the first of my mini-series about stuff going on, good books and exhibitions, unmissable Substacks and other nice things coming up. If you’ve been reading this Substack for a while, A Cambridge Letter might seem quite similar to my previous ‘Cambridge Notebook’ series, but I was inspired to adopt a new title by discovering a delightful 1956 ‘Cambridge Letter’ this week written by a young American student called Sylvia Plath (read on for more). With the new year I like the idea exploring new things and seeing what comes up every month, in happy historical and cultural combinations, in 2026. What are you looking forward to this year? I’d love to hear! Thank you so much for reading, and I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

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Twelfth Night and Nollaig na mBan

Traditionally, Twelfth Night begins as the sun sets on January 5 and ends with the celebration of Epiphany on January 6. Do you have traditions associated with this day? gives us a beguiling glimpse into the sometimes raucous celebrating that went on in the English Regency world. Food and dancing always featured, Caroline Knight writes,

‘but what made Twelfth Night truly delightful was the tradition of role-playing that turned social order delightfully upside down. Guests drew slips of paper from a hat to determine which character they would play for the entire evening—characters like “Sir Gregory Goose,” “Sir Tumbelly Clumsy,” “Miss Fanny Fanciful” …Jane Austen herself participated in this game “with more than a little spirit” at one gathering, drawing the character of Mrs. Candour—a woman who took people aside and told them exactly what she thought of them. One can only imagine Jane’s wit and sharp observations delivered in character!’

asks ‘Was this not love, indeed? in his elegant essay on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. has an impressive guest list for her ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ series on writers’ advice, here. And in ‘The Play that Goes Wrong – Shakespeare-style’ gives us a glimpse of the riotous scenes around the first production of Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors at Gray’s Inn, London in 1594.

In Ireland, the Feast of the Epiphany is also known traditionally as Nollaig na mBan, the ‘women’s Christmas’, when traditionally men take over the household chores, and women have the day off to socialize together. The Irish food writer conjures up the festive atmosphere in his recent post here.

‘One of the most consistent features of Women’s Christmas in oral memory is movement. Women leave the house. They go to neighbours, sisters, cousins, pubs, parish halls. The social energy of food and drink flows outward, into the countryside and the city. In some rural areas, small gatherings were organised deliberately so that no one woman had to host. In towns, women went out together. The food followed that looseness. It did not require preparation. It did not anchor anyone to the stove, at least not on that day.’

Waking up to a vision of snow falling lightly over Cambridge this morning, I was naturally reminded of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ which takes place on 6th January, 1904. There’s a full-length (1.5 hours) reading of it on BBC Radio 3 here. Highly recommended, and explores the meaning of ‘epiphany’ in a secular light.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Before the Christmas lights come down, takes us on a photographic tour of modern-day Listowel in North Kerry. And on the subject of tours, I wrote about the Irish author Samuel Beckett taking his mother May Beckett on a driving holiday inspired by their shared love of English literature here. Oh, to have been a passenger in that little hire car (apart from when it was struggling up Devon’s hills).

Sylvia Plath’s Cambridge Letter, May 1956

I loved the spirited letter that Plath wrote for the Oxford student magazine Isis in May 1956 (not long after she’d met Ted Hughes at a party) as a second-year student at Newnham College, Cambridge. In her article she gives a humorous view of the downsides of living in this English university town (‘Guess Where It’s Heaven to be a Girl!’) and took as her subject of female students being out-numbered by males, ten to one. Far from this being an advantage, she points out that it leads to women having to choose between too many parties and ‘dates’, or becoming ‘one of those bluestockinged Cambridge women who brood in the University Library until closing time’.

Perhaps a restoration of the old French salon, with each Cambridge girl presiding like Madame Récamier over her ratio of ten men, would enrich male/female relationships. More likely, co-educational public schools would make intelligent sharing of ideas easier, less self-conscious from an earlier age. At least co-ed university activities such as political clubs, newspaper work, and acting, make it possible for men and women to meet on a sounder basis than the superficial sherry party where a girl is just that, and, alas, not much more.

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2026 exhibitions and other ‘going out’ things

• If, like me, you can’t resist an exhibition about authors’ working methods, ‘John le Carré: Tradecraft’ at the Bodleian Library in Oxford promises to be a treat. It includes notes taken during his time as a student at Lincoln College there, to drafts penned in his final weeks. ‘This exhibition offers unique insights into the working methods of the writer who shaped the modern spy novel,’ the exhibition’s curators write. ‘‘Tradecraft’ is a word le Carré used to describe the techniques of espionage, but it might also be applied to his own skilled craft as a writer and social commentator.’

• A new statue of Sylvia Townsend Warner is now sitting comfortably on a bench in Dorchester’s main shopping street. As Nicola Beauman points out in her monthly ‘Persephone Books’ newsletter, there’s some irony about Denise Dutton’s sculpture of a great writer being placed outside a shop ‘selling fripperies’. I agree. Perhaps, given time, there’ll be a new bookshop there instead, as surely befits the tumbling pile of books (plus beloved cat) at Sylvia’s feet. (I wrote about her best-known novel Lolly Willowes here, with a sketch of this statue when it was still a work in progress.)

• It’s good news that Persephone Books are considering reissuing another edition of Reuben Sachs, the 1888 novel by Amy Levy which attracted so much controversy in her short lifetime. Cambridge University Library has recently acquired the personal archive of this under-appreciated novelist, poet and essayist (Amy Levy has been described as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’). As a result of more biographers, scholars and researchers having access to this new material, it’s likely that Levy’s work will be become much better known, as it deserves to be. I wrote about her time as a Cambridge student and friendship with her tutor Ellen Wordsworth Darwin below.

• This year in the UK there will be a record number of art exhibitions placing the work of women artists in the spotlight. The Observer’s art critic Laura Cumming writes that ‘the woman who has waited longest for due acclaim remains the Scottish artist Joan Eardley (1921-63), a landscape painter of stirring genius and one of the most original artists of the 20th century.’ If you have read the incomparable ’s post ‘Claimed by the sea’ about Eardley’s painting in Catterline, north-east Scotland, you will get an idea of why her art deserves to be better known.

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  That’s it for this week! If you enjoyed this post, it would be lovely if you could give it a ‘like’ and share it with others. Coming soon, more about Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s… and I’d love to hear more about your own reading and ‘going out’ plans for this year.

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‘I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me.... if I had been rich I should have founded a learned community for women... as it is, I am content to have lived many years of my life in a college.’ (Jane Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, Hogarth Press, 1925)

Thank you so much for being such brilliant, generous supporters of Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society over the past year. Here is a little 2025 round-up of some of my most popular posts, with a sprinkling of photos (mostly from my walks around Cambridge) that I published on Substack Notes. Hope you don’t mind me looking back, it’s just been so enjoyable writing for you here.

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In January I wrote about two new poems by Virginia Woolf and twentieth-century books by women writers (and one man). In February I wrote about ‘the girl who dared to wear yellow’: Louise Creighton. Other Cambridge women featured in my posts this year include Lady Caroline Jebb, Professor Muriel Bradbrook, Newnham students Winnie Beerbohm and Mary Alice Willcox.

In March 2025 I took part in a sparkling discussion about women’s history in a London bookshop, with , , , and among others. It was wonderful to meet Substack writers and readers in person and share our thoughts.

In April I wrote the third of three posts on Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s Lolly Willowes, part of our twentieth-century book club series. I also wrote this year about The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff and several posts about Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. There were great comments about all these books, and I was impressed by how much-loved Sayers still is as a writer. In May a guest post by from her new book Wildly Different: How five women reclaimed nature in a man’s world (MUP, 2025). In June 2025 I published my 100th Substack post and had a little midsummer night’s celebration.

In July and August I gave a talk on Jane Ellen Harrison at Newnham College Cambridge and also online as part of the excellent ’s summer course 2025. You can find the published version here.

That summer I also gave a talk to Newnham alumni about the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s influential (but often forgotten) work in higher education, forthcoming here on Substack in 2026. The college’s iconic 1897 Yates-Thompson Library featured among other beautiful libraries in my August post ‘Libraries to fall in love with’. My essay ‘How Sweet the Music’ on the children’s writer Lucy M. Boston was published by Slightly Foxed magazine, and the editors kindly allowed me to republish it here.

In September and October 2025 I began my series on Jan Struther’s classic novel Mrs Miniver with a post about ‘Rearranging the chrysanthemums’, and how this carefree activity would take on a poignant resonance as the war drew ever closer in 1939.

In November 2025 I celebrated my second Substack anniversary, with a promise of three exciting new posts to come in 2026. Don’t let me forget to share those with you! I also wrote about the geneticist Rosalind Franklin and (no connection) about the marvellous Steamboat Ladies of 1903-8.

In December I started writing about the first novel published by mid-century writer, Elizabeth Taylor, part of our twentieth-century book club reading series that I set out last January. Our discussion of At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945) will continue in January 2026.

Ok, that’s it for the year! My warmest thanks to all of you for reading, subscribing, commenting and sharing my posts. I’m especially grateful to and for inviting me as a guest on their wonderful Substacks this year, and very excited about new plans for 2026 – to be announced here soon. Meanwhile, I wish you all a very happy and peaceful festive season with lots of good reading in prospect.

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Welcome to the second part of our series about the English writer Elizabeth Taylor; this post is about how her writing sparked into life again in wartime, and led to her first published novel At Mrs Lippincote’s, published in 1945. These posts are part of my 2025-26’s 20th-century book club series, comprising bonus literary posts for paying subscribers, with a focus on mid-century British and Irish novels by women writers. You can read Part One (an introduction to Taylor’s early life) here, and Part Three, discussing the novel itself in more detail, is scheduled for January 2026. And do read to the end for more about the striped armchair in the photograph above…

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