On the night of Halloween, FHS English A level students, together with visitors from Chelsea Academy and Lady Margarets School, settled down to a lecture entitled What is a novel? given by Dr Charlotte Grant of the New College of the Humanities.
It was a wide-ranging and fascinating talk that looked at the emergence of the novel form in the late seventeenth century and its subsequent development, as well as looking at the relationship between text, author and reader, and offering an overview of various different literary theories. The notion that once upon a time novels were seen as morally hazardous, indeed positively dangerous, was a pertinent reflection on this night of scary thrills and superstition.
