Professor Alison Twells Inaugural Lecture

About

In 2009, Dr Alison Twells was left a suitcase containing a collection of diaries, letters and photographs by her great aunt Norah, who began writing her first Letts’ School-girl’s Diary in 1937, when she was twelve years old, and continued with a daily entry until the night she died, aged 84. In this International Women’s Day talk, Alison explores how Norah’s diaries reveal a hidden history of working-class girlhood and, in the era of #MeToo, a very topical story. Her focus is a mysterious wartime ‘love triangle’ that developed from a sailor’s letter of thanks for a pair of seaboot socks that Norah, as a fifteen-year-old grammar school girl in 1940, had knitted for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund. Documenting an experience that we would now call sexual grooming, Norah’s ‘suitcase archive’ reveals lewd letters, lies and disappearances, raising questions about the men's identities and intentions, and a young woman’s appetite for life and love amidst unexpected dangers.

Alison will also discuss writing history from family documents and stories. When her great aunt’s diaries first came her way, she knew immediately that she wanted to write about Norah’s wartime coming of age. She struggled, however, to see it as ‘academic history’. It seemed to her that the academic style and voice would neither bring Norah’s diaries to life, nor enable a story that Norah would have recognised as her own. This felt important: despite more than sixty years of women’s history and ‘history from below’, we still have so few historical accounts of the lives of working-class women and girls, told on their own terms and in their own words. Might family stories and life writing methods enable us to look beyond archival absences and fragmented sources, and place ordinary girls at the centre of historical writing?

Dr Alison Twells is a Professor of Social and Cultural History at Sheffield Hallam University. She has researched and published widely, in the fields of Sheffield’s local/global history, particularly in relation to abolition and missions; Edward Carpenter and the history of sexuality; and women’s dairies, autobiography and life writing. She has written material for schools and a city history walk exploring Carpenter’s life, and has pioneered the teaching of community history in UK universities. Alison’s book about Norah’s ‘suitcase archive’, A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2025.

Timings

18:00 - Arrival - Tea & coffee served

18:30 - Lecture to commence

19:30 - Lecture to close - Refreshments to be served

20:30 - Event to close

Location

9130 Cantor Building, Sheffield Hallam University

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Sheffield Hallam Events