English Literature & Translation Course 2025/26

The Last Novels of Six Twentieth-Century Female Writers

Of the six writers chosen - Nancy Mitford, Daphne Du Maurier, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Wesley and Muriel Spark - some are almost forgotten, some certainly underrated.

During this six-month course, we shall be reading and discussing not their best-known novels, but their final, often neglected, works. Who has not read Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’?  But who has read ‘Rule  Britannia’, her last novel, which predicted Brexit and its consequences some seventy years before Britain’s actual exit from Europe? 

Last novels rarely enjoy the limelight of their predecessors, but this does not mean they are inferior.  They have, above all, been written with an intensity and an urgency only to be found in a writer’s final work.  

Participants are asked to read the following novels, which will be discussed in order:

1. Nancy Mitford - Don’t Tell Alfred 
2. Daphne Du Maurier -Rule Britannia  
3. Elizabeth Taylor - Blaming  
4. Elizabeth Bowen - Eva Trout  
5. Mary Wesley - Part of the Furniture
6. Muriel Spark -The Finishing School

Your course-leader – Philip Moore