Putting Myself into History: Red, Red Robin: My Long Goodbye to Home. Professor Alison Light in Conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy

Putting Myself into History:

Red, Red Robin: My Long Goodbye to Home

Professor Alison Light in Conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy

Book Launch

What would it mean to put ourselves into history? 

Professor Alison Light is an award-winning literary and cultural historian and author of Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) and A Radical Romance (2019). Her latest memoir, Red, Red, Robin: My Long Goodbye to Home, looks back fifty years to her childhood, her growing up in an extended, working-class family, and her leaving for university. 

How do we balance in a memoir what Virginia Woolf called the 'granite' of the past with the 'rainbow' of our inner world?

Using sources from her own life—from her doll's house and toys to her teenage diaries—she explores a British postwar world, its popular culture, music and language. She asks whether it is ever possible to leave home, and whether we can retain our attachment to the past without nostalgia or disavowal. Might there be such a thing as 'radical nostalgia'? In a culture such as ours, which is, in French theorist Roland Barthes' words, dominated by the ‘publicity of the private’, what might a memoir do that other forms of historical narrative can't, or is the proliferation of memoir merely a symptom of today's rampant individualism?  

What kinds of different writing—analytical and argumentative, humorous, lyrical and imaginative—might moving between history 'proper' and memoir entail?

In conversation with Dr Kate Kennedy, Alison will reflect on her experiments in life-writing, from her discovering the servants who worked for Virginia Woolf to charting her own family history over four centuries and her account of marriage and widowhood in her forties.

This conversation will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, and to anyone interested in memoir, memory, family history, nostalgia, and the relationship between personal experience and wider social and cultural history. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Speaker Details:

Professor Alison Light is the author of six books of non-fiction to date and numerous other publications; she is a contributor to the London Review of Books and has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement among others. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.  She is an Honorary Fellow in English and History at Pembroke College, Oxford.  All her books have been enthusiastically reviewed in the national and international press. Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) was runner-up for the Longmans History Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) Prize in non-fiction. Common People: The History of an English Family (2014) was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. A Radical Romance (2019) won the Pen Ackerley Prize for memoir.

Dr Kate Kennedy is a biographer, cellist, and broadcaster, and one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music. She lectures in Music and English at Oxford University, where she is Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College. She is also Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her newest book, Cello: A Journey Through Silence to Sound (Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury, 2024), is a group biography weaving together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to BBC TV and radio, writing and presenting documentaries on subjects ranging across music history and biography.

Further Details and Contacts:

Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.

This event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider donating £5, £10, £20, or more to support OCLW’s free events, outreach activities, and programmes, helping us to keep life-writing open to all.

Donations can be made when booking your place or via our online donations portal. Every gift makes a difference. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is required. Registration will close at 14:30 on 17/11/2026.

This is a hybrid event. The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.