From Emile Brontë’s West York Moors to the mining town where DW Lawrence set Sons and Lovers, there is much literary heritage to be discovered all over the UK.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has just published 25 literary works by female authors with their real names for the first time. Could we do the same for Miles Franklin and Henry Handel Richardson here?
Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Like it or not, the literary canon is part of the cultural capital of the West. Universities that choose not to teach it – or refuse to critically engage with it – are actually disempowering students.