Leslie Stephen Lecture 2010: The Dark Sixteenth Century

Mon 1 November 2010

Senate House

The relationship between English poetry and the island of Ireland in the sixteenth century was fraught and remains fascinating. The lecture will focus on one town in south-east of Ireland - Enniscorthy where I was born - which was briefly owned by Edmund Spenser and was inhabited for twenty years by one of the shadowy figures in the English Renaissance, Lodovick Bryskett. It will trace their relationship to both poetry and the colonial enterprise and then deal with the slow emergence of poetry written in English by natives of the town, the descendants of families whom the English poets viewed as barbarous.

Colm Tóibín is the author of several novels, many of which deal with the people of his native Ireland, and their lives at home and overseas. His first novel, The South, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel award and, since then, many of his works have attracted critical acclaim:

The Blackwater Lightship, the story of a young man dying of AIDS and trying to reconcile himself with his family, described as “entirely unsentimental, but deeply moving”, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999

The Master, his 2004 novel about Henry James, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in that year and won the LA Times Prize for Fiction: “"an illumination of the very process of writing itself”.

His most recent novel, Brooklyn, won the 2009 Costa Novel Award.

Of the process of writing, he says “something occurs to me. Often, it has come when I am under pressure. And sometimes, as … with The Blackwater Lightship, it comes suddenly and clearly in a given moment that I can remember. Then it’s a process of waiting, writing nothing down, leaving it to settle or grow… and then simply going, again when you least expect it, and writing down the first sentence”.

Born in Enniscorthy Co. Wexford, in 1955, he now lives in Dublin. He is the Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Studies at Princeton University.

Leslie Stephen (1832 - 1904), father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, graduated from Trinity Hall with a BA in 1854 and an MA in 1857. He then remained a Fellow of the College for a number of years.

Cost: Free