408Z Summer 2025 1930s British Women Novelists and Friends

This course will be about the importance of eras and friendships (support systems, close sisters) for women novelists’ careers. A famous 1930s or “ between the wars pair,” Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, is actually a trio that includes Virginia Woolf, about whom Holtby wrote the first book. We’ll study the era, analogous to our own, where just as looming fascism, war, and a hard pushback against suffragist/feminist gains occur, there’s an increase in professional women artists and flowering of women mystery writers, e.g. Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. Participants will read Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece novel, South Riding (weeks 1-4); Vera Brittain’s novel, The Dark Tide (week 5); and three short novellas from a volume by Virginia Woolf (week 6).The class will view a choice from apposite great movie adaptations, South Riding, Testament of Youth, and the brilliant To the Lighthouse.

Ellen Moody has been teaching since 1972—in senior colleges until May 2012, and now for 10 years at two OLLIs. She’s a published scholar with specialties in the 18th through 20th centuries. She has a special love for women’s writing across the ages, historical novels, life writing, and film adaptations.