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The Monthly Novel: Family Histories

3 Monthly sessions, Friday 30 January, Friday 27 February, and Friday 27 March at 11am - 2pm, starting from Friday 30 January.

Overview

On this course we shall read 3 novels where family history is explored in relation to wider historical and social forces.  Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot, (1923), begins in 1879 and charts the lives of the privileged Garden family until after the Great War.   Most of this family are involved in the spiritual, political and progressive movements of their times, others observe.  Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, (1995) opens with the conception of Ruby Lennox in 1951 but then moves backwards and forwards as it tells the stories of the family for over a century.  This is a family with a heritage of secrets and lies, loves and losses.  Andrea Levy’s novel, The Long Song, reaches back furthest, as July, prompted by her son, tells her own and her mother’s story of life in colonial Jamaica before and after the ‘official’ ending of slavery.    For enslaved people, the right to family life itself is denied.  Each of these distinctive novels recall comic, dramatic and tragic events through complex narration and memorable characters. 

This course aims to read family relationships and ideas of family across a range of texts which foreground history and concepts of personal and social progress. 

This course would appeal to anyone who enjoys reading literary fiction and who has an interest in how the personal interacts with the historical and political.   Students will explore their own and others views through small and wider group discussion.

Syllabus

  1. Introduction - Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot, 1923
  2. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995
  3. Andrea Levy, The Long Song, 2010

Course lecturer

At Continuing Education, Dr Shirley Jones currently runs courses on contemporary women's writing, and the thematic strand, The Monthly Novel. Previously Shirley has also taught courses on classic authors, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Dorothy Wordsworth. Shirley's PhD was a study of the Victorian writer, Margaret Oliphant.

Outside of Continuing Education, Shirley is a member of a writers' group and runs the Redbrick Writers, a community writing group, at the Victoria Gallery and Museum.

Course fee

  • Standard fee: £70
  • Concession fee: £35