TypeCast! - Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale - Friday 19/7/24 @7:00pm

We are delighted to announce the next TypeCast!, our play reading group at Typewronger.

All you need is a copy of the play, which you may source yourself or purchase from the shop. We mainly read plays written by living authors to help support their continuing work.

Please email info@typewronger.com ahead of time to secure a spot and order a copy of the play if you are interested in attending, as these events tend to be popular, and we sometimes run out of playscripts (and parts!).

Take a seat on the welcoming stage of this little bookshop as we read aloud Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale. We'll randomly assign parts on the night, and then get reading!

'Love or knowledge: which would you choose?'

A moving, comical and eye-opening story of four young women fighting for education and self-determination against the larger backdrop of women’s suffrage. 1896. Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in Britain to admit women.

The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet, when the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a 'blue stocking' - an unnatural, educated woman. They are denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.

In Jessica Swale's debut play, Blue Stockings, Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition, who will do anything to stop them. The play follows them over one tumultuous academic year, in their fight to change the future of education.

McNaughtan's Non-Fiction Book Club: The Utopians by Anna Neima - Wednesday 24/7/24 @6:30pm

Join us for a discussion of The Utopians by Anna Neima.

Santiniketan-Sriniketan in India, Dartington Hall in England, Atarashiki Mura in Japan, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France, the Bruderhof in Germany and Trabuco College in America: six experimental communities established in the aftermath of the First World War, each aiming to change the world.

Anna Neima's The Utopians is an absorbing and vivid account of these collectives and their charismatic leaders and reveals them to be full of eccentric characters, outlandish lifestyles and unchecked idealism.

Dismissed and even mocked in their time, yet, a century later, their influence still resonates in progressive education, environmentalism, medical research and mindfulness training. Without such inspirational experiments in how to live, post-war society would have been a poorer place.