An exciting new literary archive is being launched this weekend at Newnham College, Cambridge as leading authors – many of them former students at Newnham – gather to celebrate the work of women writers.

Speaking at the launch event in Cambridge will be biographer Claire Tomalin, novelist Sarah Dunant and founder of Persephone Books Nicola Beauman, all Newnham alumnae.

Beauman, whose book A Very Great Profession uses the work of women writers to present a portrait, though their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen during the 1920s and 1930s, will lead a discussion among an invited audience of authors including Ali Smith, Eleanor Bron and Katharine Whitehorn on why women write so well.

The new literary archive has been established to celebrate Newnham's authors and inspire the next generation of women writers. Around 30 authors have already donated material to the archive, including manuscripts, memoirs, letters and photographs.

According to Newnham College Principal Dame Patricia Hodgson: “Newnham wants to celebrate the achievements of its writers by inviting them to contribute something of their creative work towards a literary archive.

“Letters, diaries and photographs form a more personal link between women writers and their work. As the archive grows we hope it will inspire current and future students, and encourage an interest in writing.”

Among items so far donated to the new archive is the typed manuscript of Beauman's A Very Great Profession – complete with comments from Virago co-founder Carmen Callil – and letters and photographs from journalist Katharine Whitehorn.

“Whitehorn's letters chart her journalism career, the birth of her first child and negotiations with newspapers – everything from babies and her latest column to politics and Profumo. They are a chronicle of a young woman finding her way in the world through writing,” says Hodgson.

Writing has long been an important creative outlet for women, whose careers were – until the late 19th and early 20th centuries careers – largely limited to being either a writer or a governess.

“One of the ways women have, since the times of Jane Austen, been able to express themselves and be successful is to write. This opened a means of fulfilment and expression to women that was otherwise closed. Women continue to write well – they are empathetic. Newnham has been the cradle for some of the best female writers of the 20th and 21st centuries,” Hodgson adds.

Inspiration for the new literary archive came from Virginia Woolf who, although she was not a student at Newnham, visited the college at the invitation of its Arts Society in 1928.

The talk Woolf gave on women and fiction at Newnham, along with one given at Girton College, became A Room of One's Own, an essay that has inspired women writers for the past 80 years.


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