This workshop will consider the work of Naomi Mitchison and Sylvia Townsend Warner alongside exercises for your own life writing, hosted by Elizabeth Anderson (Lecturer in modern and contemporary women’s writing) and Timothy C. Baker (Professor of Scottish and Contemporary Literature and author of a forthcoming memoir).

 

Mitchison’s life spanned the twentieth century; she was a writer, a farmer and active in local and national politics. She wrote across numerous genres, including memoir, and during the Second World War she participated in the Mass Observation project, producing a lengthy account of daily life in rural Scotland during the war. Warner, also a twentieth-century writer, spent most of her adult life in Dorset. She and her partner, Valentine Ackland, were both active in the communist party and much of her work subversively disrupts the expectations of class and gender. She was a long-time diary writer and her work captures the extraordinary to be found in daily life.