BRLSI ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATIONS IN TANDEM WITH THE BATH SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY! The second BRLSI Big Read of 2021 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and BRLSI are delighted that leading the discussion will be Peter Davies from the Bath Shakespeare Society who will guide the hour-long discussion and kick off a day of events celebrating the...
BRLSI'S VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB TAKES ON STEFAN ZWEIG’S ONLY NOVEL! ADMISSION FREE WITH A BRLSI MEMBERSHIP. Time for another Big Read! In 1913 a young soldier discovers the terrible consequences of pity and social embarrassment when asking a girl who is lame to dance, he compensates with an afternoon visit to relieve his guilt. Set...
Live & Virtual: BRLSI Big Read - The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford. BRLSI may not be the first to feature Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, but it will not be far behind BBC1’s launch of its new television series. The Pursuit of Love will be our Big Read for May, a book...
BRLSI Big Read: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf BRLSI has celebrated Mrs Dalloway Day for the last two years and this June we welcome you to join a discussion of various aspects of this compelling novel. Virginia Woolf offers the reader so much to explore and discuss in her book that you could never tire...
BRLSI may not be the first to explore Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, but it is not far behind BBC 1's recent TV series. This fictional account of the fascinating Mitford family will be the BRLSI Big Read on Wednesday 21 July 2021. Nancy Mitford was no 'woke'; she was famous for her sharp,...
This event is ONLINE only. Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last novel, is a tale of enduring love across the class divide. Partially set in Bath, the book will be the subject of Bath Royal’s Big Read on Thursday 16 September. Diana White, local author and expert in all things Jane Austen, will introduce the book and...
Join us online to discuss R C Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September. Diana While will introduce the book and host the discussion. This event is FREE to members and tickets for non-members are £4. Please could all participants register on the tickets page - thank you. Discussion points will be forwarded at a later date....
This event will now be held at Queen Square (not online) Marie-Louise Luxemburg will introduce this brave, poetic and succinctly crafted modernist masterpiece by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Misunderstood when first published in 1939, it was decades ahead of its time in theme and tone but remains as brutally relevant today as it...
This event will be held at Queen Square (not online) Dick Bateman is a committed fan of Thomas Hardy's novels and poetry and ten years ago wrote a walk for the Royal Geographical Society's Discovering Britain series in the location of Under The Greenwood Tree. Admirers of Hardy's work, and those new to him, will be able to look at Dick's images of...
Join us at 16 Queen Square for April’s Big Read, where Marion Reed will lead a discussion on J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. A mysterious inspector investigates the wealthy Birling family and their dinner guests following the suicide of a young woman. The play has been staged and adapted for screen many times since...
Mrs Dalloway Day is becoming an annual celebration, held in mid-June. This year we will be celebrating it by having a discussion on Mrs Dalloway entitled Time and Authority in Mrs Dalloway, to be led by Betty Suchar. We all try to cope with time, organising our lives so we are on time, don't run...
This month’s book club covers The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and is led by Gerie Herbert. The End of the Affair follows the relationships between three central characters: writer Maurice Bendrix; Sarah Miles; and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles. The central theme of the novel is jealousy and obsession but along the way...
Diana White leads an informal discussion on Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Writing under the pseudonym Acton Bell, Anne Brontë published her last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848. It tells the story of a woman who flees a disastrously abusive marriage and tries to become a working artist during a time...
Was T S Eliot’s poem the end of a great tradition or the start of a new era in English poetry? Bath poet Sue Boyle will explore the idea that the apparent difficulty of The Waste Land’ can be overcome if we set Eliot’s end notes aside for a while and focus instead on his poem’s...
Join Peter Ford for a discussion on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel, his third Sherlock Holmes mystery. Originally serialised in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it was once voted number 128 of the top 200 favourite novels by a BBC poll. Things to think about while you’re reading: 1: Is the...
The January Big Read will be Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes was famously married to the American poetess and author Sylvia Plath and Birthday Letters is very much a poetic retelling of Hughes’ understanding of both the failure of his marriage and events that led to Plath’s suicide in 1963. Published only...
When her widowed father announces he has remarried, Jennifer seizes her chance to escape. Elizabeth von Arnim, best known for Enchanted April and Elizabeth and her German Garden, reinforces one of her favourite themes of freedom and independence in this light-hearted but poignant novel about the dilemma of unmarried women after the First World War....
Diana White will lead a discussion on a Henry James early novella, The Europeans, which covers some of his early themes, such as differences in American and English character and the impact of European culture on Americans. The five discussion questions are: 1 - Did the characters, Felix and Eugenia, ring true and did you...
Perfume, the highly popular novel by the German writer, Patrick Süskind, was published in 1985. The novel, described both as fantasy and a thriller, explores the consequences of the protagonist's prodigious ability to recognise scents. This informal discussion will be led by Sabine Purshouse. Things to think about while you’re reading: Grenouille is described as “one...
Virginia Woolf considered To the Lighthouse to be her best book. It is also the most autobiographical, providing insights into her family life especially the impact of her parents’ ideas about gender roles. By writing To the Lighthouse, she sought to ‘kill ‘the angel in the house’ and to free herself to write creatively. This...
Looking for a bookclub where every choice is a classic? Join us for this month’s BRLSI Big Read on ‘Anna of the Five Towns’ by Arnold Bennett and immerse yourself in the world of life in the Staffordshire Potteries of Victorian England. 'Anna of the Five Towns', a brilliantly perceptive novel of provincial life in...
Our Big Read for July is Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - come along to take part in our informal discussion, led by Diana White. Mansfield Park is the home of Sir Thomas Bertram and into it comes little Fanny Price, his niece by marriage. Fanny’s life is difficult, thanks to the unkindness of her...
Get reading now for our September Big Read - The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Widely regarded as a classic of American literature, the story follows undergraduate Esther Greenwood’s travels to New York and her subsequent breakdown and recovery. Regarded as semi-autobiographical, due to the parallels with Sylvia Plath’s own mental illness, is The Bell...
How did the mad woman in the attic become the mad woman in the attic? Wide Sargasso Sea, written in 1966 but set in 1930s Jamaica, is a tale of dislocation and dispossession. Jean Rhys uses the contradictions and conflicts following the Emancipation Act to give added depth to her critique of oppressive colonial and...
Get reading now for the November Big Read. A discussion lead by Caroline Heaton on Susanna Clarke's award-winning novel Piranesi. The reader is initially immersed in an otherworldly universe of proliferating halls, washed by internal tides, and largely inhabited by statues, seabirds and the poignant remains of earlier inhabitants. And the narrator, Piranesi, is as...
Mary Wollstonecraft’s unconventional short life overshadowed her writing. She published one fiction and five polemical works – the most famous and contentious of these being A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. This feminist treatise, received with a mixture of outrage and enthusiasm, was inspired by the fervor and excitement of the French...
Sign up for the BRLSI Big Read on Sense & Sensibility, the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be published. The novel explores how the contemporary ideals of ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ (rationality as opposed to romanticism) affect the conduct and love affairs of sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Austen’s empathy and wit make this an...
The Big Read is our regular Queen Square book club, free to members, with visitors also very welcome for just a small fee. Our book choice for April was published in 1824 and, being the same age as us, was selected to be part of the BRLSI 200th Anniversary celebrations. The Private Memoirs and Confessions...