Cambridge Ladies' Dining Society

Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society! Here’s the reading schedule for four books to read from September to December 2026 (and the start of 2027). If you need any encouragement to get started, do read Naomi Alderman’s recent, entertaining and well researched post, and remember that ‘reading will give you more agency (yes)’. ‘…reading is always a creative act.

A selection of the books I’m currently reading (and planning to read) this summer. It was a great pleasure to be invited behind the scenes recently to look at Cambridge University Library’s unique collection of early 20th-century suffrage posters. As I mentioned in my post about Ray Strachey, a copy of one of the posters in the collection is visible in the photograph of her giving a speech from a platform on the suffragists’ horse-drawn caravan.

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Just a short one from me this week to let you know that my chapter about Ellen Wordsworth Darwin (1856–1903) has just been published in a new book, From Darwin to Cornford, edited by Jane Firman and Peter Maber (Brill, July 2026).

Last week I wrote a short post about Virginia Woolf’s 1918 novelNight and Day, which, while nostalgic about Victorian way of life, takes place in London around 1910. In the book, the character of Mary Datchet is involved in suffrage work, working for the fictional ‘S.G.S.’, in the heart of Bloomsbury in Russell Square. Woolf herself was involved in the suffrage campaign in London from 1909 to 1910 (when she was still called Virginia Stephen, before her marriage to Leonard Woolf).

Have you seen the new film Night & Day, directed by Tina Gharavi? If so, what did you think of it? I haven’t seen it yet, but hoping to go very soon. That ‘&’ in the film’s title is doing a lot of work by the way, distinguishing it from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Night and Day, first published in October 1919. From what I’ve heard, the film is great fun, well acted and funny, but departs quite a bit from the original.

Sir Eardley Lancelot Holland by Walter Stoneman, bromide print, 9 January 1947 (NPG x168373) © National Portrait Gallery, London. ‘Now his face was plain to read, like a bold landscape revealed in the strong light of day.’ (31) ‘One of the great fables about late bloomers is the tortoise and the hare. We are taught as children its simple moral that the race is not to the swift. However, what we are not told is that applying the fable isn’t straightforward.

How do you start writing a book, and how important for you is a memorable opening sentence? The historian Helen Castor has recently written about the importance of first sentences: ‘they matter to me because I write in order, sentence by sentence, from the beginning to the end. Finding the right place to start therefore means I can go on.’ Helen is currently working on a new, full-length biography of Queen Elizabeth I and re-reading her favourite books on the Tudor queen.

Cambridge women 1870-1948 ‘The fact of a daughter of Papa being sent here ought to have a good influence’ Hello! and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. It’s been incredibly hot here these past few days, but a week ago, as I cycled home from the library on a Friday evening, the Cam was looking especially peaceful with the punts neatly moored. Don’t let that fool you.

Mary Newcomb, ‘Six Violas’, oil on board 1985. Private collection, currently on display at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. My diary has been full of literary-cultural-library treats this week, springing up everywhere like billowing clouds of white cow parsley by the river in Cambridge in May (after poetically mislabelling this lovely, ubiquitous wildflower as ‘meadowsweet’ in my photo of King’s College Chapel below, I’ve decided to lean into the flower theme).

Charles Darwin (1809-1882), chalk drawing by Ellen Sharples (1769-1849) ©Down House, courtesy of G.P. Darwin, Darwin Heirlooms Trust. This week’s post is my archive post about Susannah Wedgwood Darwin (1765-1817), the mother of Charles Darwin. I’m reposting it today on this second Sunday in May, when Mother’s Day is celebrated in many countries around the world. Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society explores hidden corners of women’s history.