Cambridge Literary Festival: Frances Spalding Room of One’s Own Lecture

The vibrant Cambridge Literary Festival will end again with a closing lecture on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s  Own. A polemical piece of writing, first published in 1929, it is light and amusing, while also delivering a serious protest against the subjection of women.  Woolf famously wrote, after she had been turned away from Trinity College Library: ‘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’.

This annual lecture has previously been given by the novelist Ali Smith and by the novelist, political scientist and activist Elif Shafak. This year’s speaker is a member of Clare Hall, the art historian, Bloomsbury scholar and biographer Frances Spalding. It is her knowing familiarity with how to knot and plait all the strands in a biography that will be to be to the fore in her lecture, touching on many things not said before about this famous text.

The lecture takes place on 27 April 2025, between 6pm-7pn, in the TTP Stage (Union Chamber)

A commemorative pamphlet containing the lecture is included in the in-person ticket price. See link below for tickets and further information on the speaker: https://www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com/events/a-room-of-ones-own-lecture-with-frances-spalding/