Women Artists' Life Writing in Fiction and Biography

Join writers Harriet Baker, Rebecca Birrell, and Alicia Foster for a discussion of how women artists’ life writing has been used in their work, encompassing fiction, non-fiction and biography. Moderated by Linda Goddard.

This event warmly welcomes members of the general public as well as students, researchers and academics.

Harriet Baker is a writer and critic. She has written about books and art for the London Review of Books, Paris Review, New Statesman, Times, Financial Times and TLS, among others. She has appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and Today, and has spoken at the London Review Bookshop, the Barbican and numerous literary festivals.

Her first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, was published by Allen Lane in 2024. It was awarded the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize and the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.

She is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and is represented by Harriet Moore at Aitken Alexander Associates.

Rebecca Birrell is a writer, art historian and curator. Her novel, Venus, Vanishing, will be published by Picador in the UK in July 2026 and Henry Holt in the US in October 2026. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. It was awarded an Antonia Frazer Award for a Biography in Progress by the Society of Authors in 2019. A Guardian/Observer Art Book of the Year 2021, it was described as ‘a striking act of collective empathy.’ It was also longlisted for the William M B Berger Prize for British Art History 2022 and shortlisted for the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, 2022.

Dr Alicia Foster is an art historian, curator and novelist. Her latest book, Gwen John, Art and Life in London and Paris (Thames & Hudson, 2023) was accompanied by a major exhibition at Pallant House Gallery that was praised by Waldemar Janusczak in The Sunday Times as one of his ‘shows of the year’, and by Nick Robinson in an interview with Foster on BBC4’s Today programme. Her biography of John has won wide critical praise, from Laura Freeman in The Times, ‘Foster’s book and the Pallant House exhibition give us a different Gwen John, sensuous, single-minded and experimental in how she chose to live and work,’ to Jenny Uglow in The New York Review of Books, who wrote ‘Foster makes us think again … (her) study is a genuinely critical biography...letting us see a great artist working out her own way to live, draw, and paint.’ Gwen John, Art and Life in London and Paris was a Times Book of the Year in 2023.

Linda Goddard is Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews. Her current research focuses on life writings by women artists.

About In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing Symposium

Artists, curators, writers and scholars will reflect on the various forms that life writing by women artists can take.

For centuries, women artists have produced autobiographical accounts of their lives and careers, using diaries, letters and other types of writing as a means of resistance, reflection, and self-fashioning. Taking a broad geographical approach, this symposium will address how women artists, between 1900 and the present, navigate their artistic identities through writing. We aim to explore women artists’ life writings not simply as biography or confession, but as creative and strategic sites of agency, where women articulate alternative scripts for the artistic life. Structured as a series of short papers and roundtable conversations, the conference aims to foreground discussion and debate.

Organisers: Dr Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of St Andrews, and Bye Fellow, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; Prof Linda Goddard, Professor of Art History, University of St Andrews; and Harriet Loffler, Curator of The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College

The symposium will accompany the Relative Ties exhibition that will explore the work of three generations of women artists from the illustrious Nicholson family, from the early twentieth century to today. Featuring paintings, wallpaper, fabrics, rugs, stencils and works on paper – many of which have never been on public display – the exhibition will unite works by Mabel Nicholson, Nancy Nicholson, EQ Nicholson and Louisa Creed. Tracing the influence between these women, the exhibition will reveal how creative legacies are inherited through matrilineal lines and will be accompanied by a new commission by artist Katie Schwab. Piecing together the entangled relationships of these women has been made possible via letters, exhibition ephemera and anecdotes passed down by the surviving generations. The exhibition provides the perfect backdrop to a symposium that looks at the remnants, traces and archives that document and outlive these women artists.

This event is free for attendees of the conference 'In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing Symposium', please book a free place via this Eventbrite page so we can keep track of numbers.

Accessibility

• Buckingham House is located away from the college's main building, situated on Buckingham Road - directly opposite (across the road from) the turning circle/main entrance to the college.
• The entrance is accessible via a power-assisted door with a 'Push to Open' button. Past this door, in the entrance vestibule, is a set of manual glass double doors, which can be pushed or pulled.
• Gendered toilets and one accessible toilet are located at the rear of the conference centre, to the right of the servery.
• The lecture theatre is located at the very end of the foyer via manual wooden double doors with pull handles, leading to a vestibule.
• Turning left, there is a route to a lift, which provides access to the front row of seating and the stage.
• Use of the lift must be pre-arranged as a key is required to operate it.

See here for more information about College accessibility: https://cambridgemeetingspace.com/accessibility-information

Please get in touch if you have any further queries or requirements: [email protected] or call the Porter's Lodge at +44 (0)1223 762100.

The income from this event goes towards supporting The Women's Art Collection at Murray Edwards College (Charity reg:1137530).

Image: , 1982. The Women's Art Collection.

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