English at Royal Holloway, University of London

English at Royal Holloway, University of London Welcome to the page for the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. We are creative and critical. We love literature.

We are readers, writers and researchers. We are readers and writers.

First years 👋 did anyone catch the new Sense and Sensibility this weekend?Georgia Oakley’s film (she made Blue Jean) ope...
26/09/2026

First years 👋 did anyone catch the new Sense and Sensibility this weekend?

Georgia Oakley’s film (she made Blue Jean) opened on Friday, with Daisy Edgar-Jones as Elinor and Esmé Creed-Miles as Marianne. The early reviews keep returning to two things: the damp, dewy, weather-soaked look of it, and how firmly Diana Reid’s screenplay puts the sisters at the centre. Several critics have called the Elinor–Marianne bond the film’s real love story. Austen would probably agree, given the title is a portrait of two sisters.

Then there’s the elephant in the drawing room. Ang Lee’s 1995 version, written by Emma Thompson (who won the Oscar for it) and starring her as Elinor opposite Kate Winslet, is for many people simply what Sense and Sensibility looks like. Hugh Grant stammering through his proposal. Thompson’s sob when Edward finally explains himself. Hard acts to follow.

So what did you make of it? 👇

💭 Is Edgar-Jones’s quieter, steelier Elinor closer to Austen’s than Thompson’s?
💰 Austen’s second chapter is John and F***y Dashwood talking themselves out of helping his stepmother and half-sisters, one shrinking sum at a time. How does the film handle money?
🌧️ Frank Dillane’s Willoughby: dangerous enough to fall for?
🎬 Does an adaptation owe more to the novel or to the famous adaptation that came before it?

Tell us in the comments. Bonus points if you read the novel first. Then bring your opinions to seminar, because adaptation is going to come up more than once this year.

Huge congratulations to Professor Adam Roberts, whose Fantasy: A Short History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) has won the 2...
26/09/2026

Huge congratulations to Professor Adam Roberts, whose Fantasy: A Short History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) has won the 2026 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies 🏆

Adam’s book tells the story of fantasy from the Victorian revival of Arthurian legend all the way to Tolkien and Susanna Clarke. Along the way he tracks how the Norse and Old English myths rediscovered after Ossian and the Brothers Grimm fed into the dragons, quests and invented kingdoms we now take for granted. His argument is that fantasy re-enchants the present. It answers mechanised, industrial modernity with wonder, and Adam follows that impulse off the page and into art, music, film and TV.

Many of us heard Adam talk through these ideas at his Inaugural Lecture earlier this year, so it’s a real pleasure to see the book recognised by the Mythopoeic Society. Adam has spent a career thinking about genre as both a scholar and an award-winning science fiction novelist, and this prize is richly deserved.

Join Royal Holloway's Literature Society tomorrow night for their bookmark making craft night!Meet them in room ELIOT-1-...
23/09/2026

Join Royal Holloway's Literature Society tomorrow night for their bookmark making craft night!

Meet them in room ELIOT-1-01 in George Eliot accommodation @ 7:00pm ⭐️

Congratulations to Creative Writing PhD student Eve Esfandiari-Denney, whose debut collection Girling is out now with Fi...
23/09/2026

Congratulations to Creative Writing PhD student Eve Esfandiari-Denney, whose debut collection Girling is out now with Fitzcarraldo Editions! 💙

Girling asks where life ends and death begins, and how much of who we are is already written into our DNA and the places we come from. It starts from a personal history and opens outwards, ending as life moves towards the speaker, “gloriously close”. Funny and philosophical, it’s a book for right now.

Eve’s pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening came out with Bad Betty Press in 2022. She’s been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and the White Review Poet’s Prize, among others.

📍 Hear Eve read at Lala Books, London, on Thursday 24 September, 7–9pm. Will Harris and K Patrick are on the bill, with Lamorna Ash joining them. The event has sold out, but you can join the waiting list at [email protected]

Congratulations, Eve! 🎉

FitzcarraldoEditions Poetry NewPoetry PoetryCollection DebutCollection PhDLife

The river runs through Queens this week. 🌊Dr Karina Lickorish Quinn reads from her forthcoming novel The River Dies Quie...
23/09/2026

The river runs through Queens this week. 🌊
Dr Karina Lickorish Quinn reads from her forthcoming novel The River Dies Quietly, a book set in Peru that crosses borders and languages. Here’s your chance to hear it before it reaches the shelves.
📖 Author Reading
📍 Queens Lecture Theatre
🕕 6–7pm, [date]
Start the evening with us at the Departmental Social in the Shilling Foyer and Auditorium from 5–6pm. Hot pizza and soft drinks are on us, and staff will be looking forward to meeting new and returning students.
Both events are open to every student in the department, whatever you study. Languages and CLC students will find plenty to follow in the novel’s Peruvian setting and transnational story.
Queens is a minute’s walk from Shilling, so come for the pizza and stay for the reading.

🍂 On 21 September 1819, John Keats wrote to a friend that he’d never liked stubble fields so much. “Somehow a stubble pl...
21/09/2026

🍂 On 21 September 1819, John Keats wrote to a friend that he’d never liked stubble fields so much. “Somehow a stubble plain looks warm,” he said, “in the same way that some pictures look warm.”

Two days earlier he’d walked through the water meadows outside Wi******er and come home with a poem. He was 23. It became “To Autumn”, the last of his great odes.

It opens with everything at bursting point:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”

Apples weigh down the branches. The bees keep working because they “think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”

Then autumn turns into a person, and a lazy one. We find them dozing in a half-harvested field:

“Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers”

The scythe stops mid-swing, and the poem lives in that pause. Later, autumn sits by a c***r press and “watchest the last oozings hours by hours”. Read that line slowly and you can hear it drip.

The final stanza is all sound at dusk. Gnats, lambs, hedge-crickets, a robin, and then:

“And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

Those swallows are massing to migrate. Keats closes on birds getting ready to leave. He died in Rome seventeen months later, aged 25.

Take the poem with you on a walk down to the meadows at Runnymede this week. It’s 33 lines and takes about two minutes out loud.

Which line stays with you? 👇

AutumnEquinox Poetry

Are you getting ready to join the BA English and American Literature degree at Royal Holloway this coming September, or ...
30/07/2026

Are you getting ready to join the BA English and American Literature degree at Royal Holloway this coming September, or thinking about applying in the future? You may be wondering what you’ll read — and what questions you’ll explore — during your degree. 📚🇺🇸

As part of the BA English and American Lit degree, the compulsory first-year syllabus introduces you to a wide range of texts, genres, periods, and perspectives, building the foundations for studying literature from both sides of the Atlantic. You’ll develop confidence as a reader, writer, and critical thinker while discovering new ways of understanding how literature responds to the world around us.

In your second year, the compulsory module The American Century asks you to think more closely about the literature and culture of the United States. How have writers responded to America’s changing place in the world? Whose experiences have shaped ideas of American identity — and whose voices have been excluded? What can literature reveal about race, power, gender, migration, inequality, and the promises and contradictions of the American Dream?

Studying American literature helps us understand not only the United States, but also its global cultural and political influence. At a time when questions of identity, belonging, history, and power remain urgently relevant, these texts give us the tools to examine familiar narratives, encounter different perspectives, and think critically about the stories nations tell about themselves.

This is only the beginning of the journey: developing new interests, challenging assumptions, and gaining the skills to interpret thoughtfully and communicate clearly.

[Reading lists are always subject to change, so this post offers a strong indication of what you may study rather than an exhaustive list]

Do you have a place to study out BA English and Creative Writing degree at Royal Holloway, or are you still deciding whe...
27/07/2026

Do you have a place to study out BA English and Creative Writing degree at Royal Holloway, or are you still deciding whether we’re for you? Either way, you’re probably wondering what you’ll be reading — and writing — during your first year. 📚✍️

Our first-year syllabus is designed to help you explore literature from both a critical and a creative perspective. You’ll encounter a wide range of texts, genres, periods and ideas, while beginning to experiment with different forms, develop your own voice and discover how reading can shape your practice as a writer.

This is the start of a creative and intellectual journey: building confidence as a reader, writer and editor; sharing and developing work through workshops; discovering new influences and passions; and learning how to communicate with clarity, imagination and purpose.

Swipe through for a glimpse of what you could study during your first year at Royal Holloway. ➡️

[Reading lists and course content are always subject to change, so this is a good indication of what you may study rather than an exhaustive list]

Have a place to study the BA English at Royal Holloway, or still deciding if we’re for you? Either way, we’re sure you’l...
22/07/2026

Have a place to study the BA English at Royal Holloway, or still deciding if we’re for you? Either way, we’re sure you’ll be wondering what you’ll get to read during the first year of the English degree at Royal Holloway. 📚

Our first-year syllabus is varied, exciting and designed to open up new ways of thinking about literature. It offers a wide introduction to texts, genres, periods, and ideas you’ll encounter throughout your degree — but it’s really only the beginning.

This is the start of a journey: building confidence as a reader and writer, discovering new passions, and developing the skills to communicate clearly, interpret thoughtfully, and understand perspectives beyond your own.

In a world where communication, understanding, interpretation, and empathy can feel in short supply, studying literature matters more than ever.

[reading lists are always subject to change, so this is really good indication of what you’ll get to study, not an exhaustive list]

LiteratureMatters

English matters - Now more than ever.“London firms warn of widening AI skills gaps” - BBC News (21/07/26): https://www.b...
21/07/2026

English matters - Now more than ever.

“London firms warn of widening AI skills gaps” - BBC News (21/07/26): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g3zn4le1jo

Studying English is not simply about reading books or analysing quotations. It is about learning how language shapes ideas, identities, and the world around us.

English teaches us to question what we read, recognise different perspectives, test arguments, and communicate complex ideas with clarity and purpose. It develops the critical thinking needed to navigate misinformation, the empathy needed to understand experiences beyond our own, and the confidence to participate thoughtfully in public life.

At a time when technology can generate words in seconds, the distinctly human ability to interpret, evaluate, imagine and connect matters more than ever.

English does not just prepare students for a career. It prepares them to think independently, communicate meaningfully, and engage critically with an increasingly complex world.

That is why English matters.

CommunicationSkills HigherEducation UniversityEnglish TheHumanities

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