Literary non-fiction

Discover and explore extraordinarily rich memoirs and tales from renowned contemporary women writers, including Rebecca Solnit, JoanDidion and Margo Jefferson.

This course explores how critical and narrative theory can add insight to your reading and help you appreciate literature at a deeper interpretative level. Through our readings of modern fiction (Virginia Woolf, Ian McEwan, Michael Cunningham, F. Scott Fitzgerald), we will examine how feminist, postmodern, Marxist and narrative theory offer lenses that enrich our understandings of these works.

Join our Summer Reading Group, which explores three extraordinary memoirs over three sessions: Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues (1962, trans. 1985), considering her writings from 1944 to 1960; Deborah Orr’s Motherwell (2020), a story of childhood, class, culture and inheritance; Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons (2024), about her life and the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her.

Classes on 7 May, 11 June and 9 July.

This six-week course offers an insight into the creativity, passion and intellect behind some of the most celebrated exponents of the modern/contemporary essay form. From Lydia Davis to Teju Cole; Anthony Bourdain to Zadie Smith, learners will encounter an exciting and eclectic range of voices, approaches and subjects.

The last couple of decades have seen an explosion of a relatively new kind of writing - the memoir. Stories of abusive childhoods, extraordinary parents, and uncovered family secrets fill the shelves of bookshops. Some are mockingly dubbed misery memoirs, some even exposed as fakes. But among them are some masterpieces of modern writing - accounts of painful coming to maturity, or of the growth towards a deeper understanding of a world always taken for granted. We will read and consider a selection.