Newcastle University

Introduction

Alison Light is a Visiting Professor in the School of English.  She is also a freelance writer. She has worked at the BBC and as a lecturer in English at Royal Holloway College and University College London University; she has also taught for the WEA, at the Open University and Brighton Poly in the 1980s.  She spent several years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel History Research Centre (UEL- Birbeck) whose public archive is based at the Bishopsgate Institute, London (www.raphael-samuel.org.uk). Most recently, she was Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture (part-time) at Newcastle University.  Apart from her academic publications and reviews, she has written for the national press, including The Guardian, The Independent, and the London Review of Books; she has also broadcast on BBC radio and television. Her last book, Mrs Woolf and the Servants won second prize for the History Today Longman Prize and was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Published in the USA by Bloomsbury Press, it was named by the Atlantic Monthly as one of the top five books of 2009 - fiction or nonfiction in the UK or the USA.  It was 'Book of the Year' in the New Yorker, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman.  She is also Visiting Professor in Popular Literature at Sheffield Hallam University where she has acted as an advisor on a public collection of popular works housed in the University Library, and a Visiting Member of the English Faculty at Oxford University. 

Qualifications

BA Cantab; MA, D.Phil University of Sussex.

Research Interests

My interests are broadly in twentieth-century British literature and history; I have written on a wide variety of topics from across the literary board; on popular culture, film, modernism and cultural politics; feminism and women's writing; biography and lifewriting; Englishness and social class.

Selected Publications include

2007 Mrs Woolf and the Servants, (Fig Tree/Penguin Press/Bloomsbury USA)
2007 The Lost World of British Communism (essays by the historian, Raphael Samuel), (Verso), edited with Preface.
2004 ‘Biography and Autobiography since 1970’, Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (edited P. Nicholls and L. Marcus), (Cambridge University Press)
2004 preface to reprint of Daphne du Maurier, The Rebecca Notebooks and Other Memories (Virago)
2000 Flush by Virginia Woolf, with introduction and notes for Penguin Classics
1997 Island Stories (essays by the historian Raphael Samuel),(Verso)edited with Preface).
1994 Preface to Twentieth Century Romance and Historical Writers (3rd edition),(St James Press)
1991 Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, (Routledge)

Current Work

I am currently writing a book, provisionally entitled Common People: An English Family History without Roots, which incorporates memoir and my own family history back to the 1750s in order to look at the history of the English labouring poor. It will be published by Fig Tree/Penguin.

• Light A. Diary - on Baptists. London Review of Books 2010, 35.
• Light A. Response. Journal of Women's History 2009. , 21(3), 149-152.
• Light A. A Child's Sense of the Past. New Formations 2009, 67, 10-15.
• Light A. 'The age of anxiety': review of The Morbid Age: Britain between the wars by Richard Overy. The Guardian 2009, 8, review section.
• Light A. Diary. London Review of Books 2008, 30(3), 38-39.
• Light A. 'Lady Talky' review of 'Bloomsbury Ballerina' by Judith Mackerell. London Review of Books 2008, 30(24), 17-20.
• Light A. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. New York USA: Bloomsbury, 2008.
• Light A. Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service. London: Penguin/Fig Tree, 2007.
• Light A. Regular Terrors. London Review of Books 2007, 29(2), 19-21.
• Light A. Composing One's Self: Virginia Woolf's Diaries and Memoirs. London: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, 2007.
• Light A, ed. Preface to The Lost World of British Communism by Raphael Samuel. London: Verso, 2006.
• Light A. Introduction. In: The "Rebecca" Notebook: And Other Memories by Daphne Du Maurier. London: Virago, 2005, pp.11-18.
• Light A. Writing Lives, Biography and Autobiography since 1970. In: Marcus, L; Nicholls, P, ed. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.751-767.
• Light A. Preface to Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell (memoirs). In: Time Will Tell: Memoirs. London: Verso, 2003, pp.vii-xv.
• Light A. 'Harnessed to a Shark' -review of Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf. London Review of Books 2002, 24(6), 29-31.
• Light A, ed. Flush by Virginia Woolf - introduction and notes. London: Penguin, 2000.
• Light A, ed. Raphael Samuel's Theatres of Memory: Island Stories - Unravelling Britain. London: Verso, 1998.
• Light A. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.