Alison Light is a writer and honorary professor at both University College London and Edinburgh University; she is the author of the acclaimed Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2006) and most recently, Common People: the History of an English Family (2014), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Non-Fiction prize in the UK. She is currently writing a memoir, A Radical Romance, to be published by Penguin in 2019.
Sept/Oct 2019
Writing the Lives of “Common People”: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity
“Everyday” lives, “lives of the obscure,” the lives of “common people”—all these phrases are tricky and make me slightly uneasy because they always conjure up the opposite categories, which come […]