Reading Groups

Love in War Time with Anne Fernald (Sold Out)

3 Monthly Sessions Mondays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT July 12 to September 13, 2021

Online via Zoom

This reading group has reached its capacity. To join the waitlist, please email Allison Escoto at [email protected].

Meeting Dates:
7/12, 8/9, 9/13

In this reading group, we dive into three novels by women, each about a love affair during a time of war. Each offers intrigue, romance, politics, and love. We begin with Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936). Set in the 1848 Revolution in Paris, it was written in the shadow of the Spanish Civil War, and both conflicts inform this tale of an unhappy English wife who heads off to Paris to confront her husband’s mistress. Then, we’ll read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), in which a woman living in London during the Blitz is confronted by a government man who claims that her lover is a German agent. Finally, Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions (1976; first published 2009), an autobiographical novel about an unhappy young student caught up in a romance with a man collaborating with the Japanese occupying government in China during WWII. All three novels feature strong women contending with changes that are both personal and historical.

Session I: Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Session II: The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Session III: Little Reunions by Eileen Chang

Led by

Anne E. Fernald

Anne E. Fernald

Anne E. Fernald is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014) and author of Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (2006) as well as articles and reviews on Woolf and feminist modernism. An editor of The Norton Reader, a widely used anthology of essays, she teaches English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. She occasionally updates her blog, Fernham, and can be found on twitter @fernham.

About this series

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