Thursday, 20 Mar
18:00
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Times
6:00pm
Running Time 1 hour 30 mins
Venue York Explore Library, Explore York Library
Thu 20 Mar
More Details + Share + Book TicketsFriends of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were surprised to discover that following her very public dispute with Jonathan Swift years earlier, she kept his collected works beside the toilet. They were no longer fully intact. When Alexander Pope fell out with Edmund Curll, things escalated so far that Pope allegedly poisoned the offending bookseller. In fact, Pope’s Dunciad was essentially a long list of authors he hated.
As the poetic responses of Anne Ingram and Mary Leapor demonstrated, the feeling was often mutual. William Makepeace Thackery despised the works of Swift, Virginia Woolf scoffed at the success of Stella Gibbons and Charlotte Brontë hated the novels of Jane Austen. Samuel Johnson, a man proud to boast that he had more enemies than friends, even claimed that the best writers were always “good haters.”
The history of British Literature is bursting with stories of literary feuds and spats. Join Drs Jo Waugh and Adam James Smith, co-hosts of the Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire podcast and directors of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire, for an entertaining and enlightening examination of literature’s best bust-ups and most fruitful grievances.
This event is part of York Literature Festival and takes place at York Explore, Library Square, Museum St, York YO1 7DS.