A Room of One’s Own Lecture | Frances Spalding
Sun 27 Apr 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm

An annual opportunity for one of our foremost women writers to contemplate how far we have come since Woolf said ‘lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’. The second lecture in this series will be delivered by Festival Honorary Patron Frances Spalding.
A commemorative pamphlet containing the lecture is included in the in-person ticket price.
Venue: TTP Stage (Cambridge Union)
Duration: 1 hour
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Biography
Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS, The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, led on to a commission from the Tate to write a centennial history of this national institution. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. In 2014 she was invited by the National Portrait Gallery to curate the exhibition Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision, and to write the accompanying book. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now is Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.