Alison Light
Alison Light is a writer and critic who is currently Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. She was born in Portsmouth and educated at the universities of Cambridge and Sussex; her PhD became her first book, Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (Routledge 1991). She spent ten years helping to establish the Raphael Samuel History Centre in London and edited two volumes of Samuel’s posthumous essays: Island Stories (Verso 1997) and The Lost World of British Communism (Verso 2007). Apart from her academic publications, her work has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New Statesman, History Today, The Literary Review, The Guardian and she writes regularly for The London Review of Books. Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Penguin 2007/ Bloomsbury USA 2008) was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and won a commendation for the History Today Longmans Prize. She lives in Oxford and Newcastle and is currently writing a book for Fig Tree/Penguin press about the fascinations and fantasies of family history and the history of the English poor.
Titles
Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree, 2007)
Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (Routledge, 1991)