Event

Mecklenburgh Square, Radcliffe Yard & Beyond: A Conversation with Francesca Wade & Maggie Doherty on Writing Women’s Lives

This is a hybrid event. The in-person reception will begin at 4:30 pm.

Back in 2020 at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when communal spaces and community itself seemed under threat, biographers Wade and Doherty published books long in the making—Square Haunting and The Equivalents—which celebrated two cohorts of creative women, the first based in London’s Bloomsbury and the second at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Join us for a conversation that will range over the subjects of their books—including Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Sayers, Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin—and their work since: Wade on a biography of Gertrude Stein; Doherty in biographical essays for the New Yorker on Elizabeth Hardwick, Kathy Acker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Although their books have been reviewed jointly, this will be their first public appearance together.

Join the conversation at the New England Biography Series. By providing an opportunity for those interested in the craft of biography to convene and converse, this series creates a community that will support biographical works in progress and help inspire future projects. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at er7.chndir.net/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.