Writing the Lives of “Common People”: Reflections on the Idea of Obscurity

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.