Bøker av Alison Light

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize'A remarkable achievement...should become a classic.' - Margaret Drabble'Light writes beautifully...Common People is part memoir, part thrilling social history of the England of the Industrial Revolution, but above all a work of quiet poetry and insight into human behaviour. It is full of wisdom.' - The Times Book of the WeekFamily history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

The Feminist Library Series Editors: Jackie Jones, Alison Light & Gill Plain Brings together the pioneering work of leading feminist cultural and literary critics for a new generation of readers. Alison Light - Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work. Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction. Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

A luminous memoir of love and grief from the author of Common People First U.S. EditionAlison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic figure on the British Left, utterly driven by his work and by a commitment to collective politics. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would pass away.Theirs was an attraction of opposites- he from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements."...more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art." -GUARDIAN "Remarkable, moving, illuminating. A memoir of cauterizing honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read." -MARK BOSTRIDGE, SPECTATOR "An inspiring account of ... deep love..." -TLS "Beautifully crafted...it casts a light on the lightness of love and the profound depression of loss. A truly gifted writer." -HERALD "The portrait of Spitalfields is superb, and so is the account of Raphael's astonishing mother Minna." -MARGARET DRABBLE, TLS, BOOK OF THE YEAR "Compulsively readable. Light is a shrewd narrator...She reflects with careful psychological and philosophical insight on the reality of loneliness and profound loss following ten years of marriage...Light is also a poet and it shows in certain suppositions and propositions..." -RTE

The Feminist Library Series Editors: Jackie Jones, Alison Light & Gill Plain Brings together the pioneering work of leading feminist cultural and literary critics for a new generation of readers. Alison Light - Inside History: From Popular Fiction to Life-Writing A collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work. Inside History addresses a number of the central preoccupations within feminist cultural criticism over this period: the nature of writing by women and what women writers might or might not share; the place of such writing in any literary history or cultural analysis; the politics of popular culture and the question of pleasure; women's relation to ideas of national identity and other forms of belonging; and finally, their contribution to life-writing in its different genres. The volume offers a lively, wide-ranging way into feminist debates, touching on a number of major authors from Alice Walker to Virginia Woolf, on genre fiction, and on the writing of memoir and biography. Chronologically arranged, the essays and short 'think-pieces' chart Alison Light's own intellectual formation as a critic and writer within a wider collective politics. This is explored and contextualised in an autobiographical introduction. Alison Light is a writer and Honorary Professor in the Department of English, University College London; she is also an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University and a non-stipendiary Senior Research Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College Oxford. She is the author of a number of books, including Common People: The History of an English Family (Penguin 2014), which was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize, and her most recent, A Radical Romance, which won the 2020 PEN Ackerley prize for memoir. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Loathing, anger, shame and deep affection: Virginia Woolf s relationship with her servants was central to her life. Like thousands of her fellow Britons she relied on live-in domestics for the most intimate of daily tasks. Her cook and parlour maid relieved her of the burden of housework and without them she might never have become a writer. But unlike many of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf was frequently tormented by her dependence on servants. Uniquely, she explored her violent, often vicious, feelings in her diaries, novels and essays. What, the reader might well wonder, was it like for the servants to live with a mistress who so hated giving her orders, and who could be generous and hostile by turns?Through the prism of the writer s life and work, Alison Light explores the volatile, emotional territory which is the hidden history of domestic service. Compared to most employers in Britain between the wars, Leonard and Virginia Woolf were free and easy. Life in the Bloomsbury circle of writers and artists was often fun. Yet despite being liberal in outlook, these were also households where the differences in upbringing and education were acute: employers and servants were still us and them . The women who worked for the Woolfs, like other domestic servants, have usually been relegated to the margins of history, yet unearthing their lives reveals fascinating stories: of Sophie Farrell, the Victorian cook and family treasure , who ended her days in a London bed-sit; Lottie Hope, the parlour maid, a foundling, who d been left on a doorstep like a parcel; and Nellie Boxall, the Woolfs cook, who was finally dismissed after sixteen years of rows and reconciliations, only to find herself a more glamorous job. Mrs Woolf and the Servants is a riveting and highly original study of one of Britain s greatest literary modernists. Ultimately, though, it is also a moving and eloquent testimony to the ways in which individual creativity always needs the support of others.

Shows how ideas of national identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life during the period between the wars. Light looks at a range of writers from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Daphne du Maurier to Agatha Christie.