Welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, shining light on literary lives, women’s history and lesser known corners of literature. Notebook 5 is a potpourri of upcoming events, writers’ scribbles and a four-part signature, a new Bluestockings book and the beginnings of Cambridge’s third foundation for women, Murray Edwards College. Hope you’ll enjoy diving in.
Murder your darlings?
There’s something intriguing about the evidence of a great writer’s progress - the first thoughts, changes of mind, and crossings-out. Many writers prefer not to reveal their workings, but fortunately lots of their scribbled-on notebooks have found their way into library archives. Opening this week at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, a new exhibition called Write, Cut, Rewrite is dedicated to the creative importance of editing in literature (29 February- 5 January 2025). ‘Highlights include discarded ideas, fundamental changes, deletions, additions, notes and scribbles from great authors such as Mary and Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Samuel Beckett, and John le Carré,’ the website says.
Erica Wagner has written a great article about it in the FT here. She makes the point that the advice often given to writers to ‘kill your darlings’ (ie, edit your text by getting rid of flourishes that don’t serve your story) is itself the result of a kind of editorial process. Stephen King’s words are a pithy version of what the scholar Arthur Quiller-Couch, better known by his pseudonym ‘Q’,1 said more elegantly in his Cambridge lecture of 1914.
‘In 1914 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — author and renowned editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse — delivered a lecture at the University of Cambridge (Erica Wagner writes) in which he exhorted his audience to be strict with themselves: “Whenever . . . you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — obey it wholeheartedly — and tear it up before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” At the end of the century, bestselling author Stephen King would admonish: “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart”.’
Speaking of scribbles, this week I’ve been in the Manuscripts Room at Cambridge University Library, reading some of the scholar Ellen Wordsworth Darwin’s first love letters to Francis Darwin from 1883. She was then 27-year-old Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, a lecturer in English literature at Newnham College and he was a 34-year-old botanist and widower who had recently moved to Cambridge with his young son Bernard and his widowed mother Emma Darwin. Ellen and Francis fell in love, married, and had a daughter, Frances (Cornford). In the 1890s Ellen Wordsworth Darwin was invited to join the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, an exclusive dining group of twelve women who regularly met for serious intellectual discussion. So I was pleased to find, in a jumbled pile of her letters in the archive, evidence of her humour and Lear-like zest for language in her letters, when she rearranges her signature in four different ways to make Francis laugh: ‘Ellen Wordsworth Crofts/ Wordsworth Crofts Ellen/ Wordsworth Ellen Crofts/ Ellen Crofts Wordsworth etc’
I’m looking forward to reading Susannah Gibson’s new book, Bluestockings: The First Women's Movement, published on 29 February 2024 (I reviewed her previous book for the TLS.) I’m very interested in the Bluestockings, a circle of nine intellectual women who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, supported female education and promoted literary opportunities for women who were otherwise denied access to formal clubs, societies and universities (apart from one exceptional mixed dining club where women writers were welcome - see ‘The First of a New Genus’ below). I think of the Bluestockings as a precursor to the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society 1890-1914, about which I’ll be writing more soon.
Exhibitions and events
An ambitious new exhibition at Murray Edwards College opens on 7th March 2024. ‘The Goddess, the Deity & the Cyborg’ will be accompanied by a series of events including a curated programme by the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards and the Fitzwilliam Museum, connecting ‘The Goddess, the Deity and the Cyborg’ with ‘William Blake’s Universe’ at the Fitzwilliam. I’ll be writing more about both exhibitions soon.
On International Women’s Day, 9 March 2024, Murray Edwards College will be hosting the first in a series of events celebrating 70 years since its beginnings as the ‘third foundation’ for women students at Cambridge University. It was founded to address the issue that, in 1948 when the first Cambridge degrees were awarded to women, the university still had the lowest proportion of women undergraduates of any university in the UK, and were failing academically. (At this time there were ten times as many men as women undergraduates in the University, as the number of women was limited by statute). ‘Shortly after a movement began to make possible an increase in the number of women in the University,’ writes Rosemary Murray, the college’s first President, ‘there was no thought at that time of any man’s college admitting women.’ In 1954 the first sixteen women students of what was then known as ‘New Hall’ moved into buildings on Silver Street, next door to Gwen Raverat’s riverside house.
I’ll be writing about how Murray Edwards College found its permanent home on Huntingdon Road thanks to the extraordinary generosity of two of Gwen’s Darwin cousins, Nora Barlow and Ruth Rees-Thomas, in a future post. For more information and booking details for the Murray Edwards event, click here.
What’s in a name?
Three Substack writers whose work I always enjoy reading have discussed titles in their respective publications this month - the first two are about changing titles, and the third is about the pros and cons of gathering multiple titles (= books) for a literary prize. All are recommended reading.
Matthew Long writes Beyond the Bookshelf, and writes that he is ‘grateful the Substack platform is a vibrant artist’s colony existing in the background of all the publications… a stark change from social media in how welcoming, encouraging, and supportive the community is. It is a greenhouse of artistic growth with new creative spirits planted daily.’
Anne Boyd’s sparkling publication, ‘Audacious Women, Creative Lives’ expresses what she describes as her ‘long-standing commitment to connecting readers and writers with the path-breaking women of the past, so many of whom have been forgotten, undervalued, or misunderstood.’ She goes on to explain that she left the specialized area of academia ‘to write so-called public scholarship (which basically means writing for presses and publications that actually have a readership).’ I recommend her enjoyable post on Muriel Spark: ‘Male art monsters still tend to get a pass. But a “difficult woman” who puts her art above the people in her life does not.’
Michael Caines is the impressively knowledgeable author of ‘Bibliomania’. He’s a judge for the Ackerley Prize, the UK’s only British prize for memoir and autobiography, established in 1982 in memory of J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967). In his recent behind-the-scenes post ‘Collecting the Ackerleys’ he writes entertainingly about the ‘small deluge’ of books he is currently receiving from publishers as he and his fellow judges compile their longlist:
‘They arrive in irregular batches – six came yesterday, but none for several days before that – and come to form an odd, temporary library of their own. Themes emerge (or return). The initial promise of a book’s jacket becomes the disappointment (or joy) of its contents. Blank pieces of paper serve as bookmarks that become pages of notes.’
Finally, it was lovely to see these happy about-to-be-graduates making their way to the Senate House Cambridge last Saturday - a suitably sunny day for their celebrations, and a promise of spring at last.
Thank you for reading Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, and I appreciate any and all of your comments and thoughts.
I love this, from Maria Popova’s essay on ‘Q’: “Fittingly, his rooms in the university’s First Court [in Jesus College, Cambridge] were known as the ‘Q-bicle.’” Quiller-Couch’s series of lectures were published in 1914 as On the Art of Writing (public library).
Thanks, Ann – fingers crossed for your research into the Ladies' Dining Society..
Thank you for another interesting post, Ann. I've heard of the Blue Stockings but know little about them so I look forward to your take on this when you get to it. I love the idea of meeting up with a dozen or so women every so often... to discuss all things intellectual.