My paper on Sarah Waters’ adaptation of the music hall novel has been accepted for a conference! It will be at Lampeter University in August - details are here.

This is so exciting! I was reading my email on the sofa at home over Easter weekend, and literally screamed out loud. I was on cloud nine all weekend One of the things about the phD is that my family don’t know what it’s about. They know the topic, obviously, but they don’t understand it, haven’t read the books I’m talking about and don’t know much about 19th century performance. And why would they? My brother and sisters are either at school or university (one studying Bio-medical sciences, one graduated in Psychology) and my mum’s degree was in Audiology (she’s a teacher, was a teacher of the deaf for many years). This is such a tiny area of research, though by no means the smallest, that there are few people to discuss it with beyond my supervisors. While my family see that these things (conferences etc) are important to me and make me happy, they don’t really understand them beyond what I tell them. Which is a) great fun b) great experience c) means of making my work known which to them mostly translates as potentially-CV and funding worthy.

There is a need for Arts, Histories and Cultures PhD students to know each other. I need to know people! I would like to be able to talk about whether I’m doing enough work, and how other people are getting on, and find out about their research, and just have an occasional coffee with people who understand what my life is like! I was going to go into a rant about the faculty needing to recognise that not everybody is AHRC funded, but thought that would be impolitic so deleted it….

I am, at the moment, nearing the end of a second draft of the chapter on Mansfield Park. It’s very interesting, and hopefully supervisors will think the same! It’s intended to be a look at Mansfield Park and the play within it, Lovers’ Vows, and seeing how one reflects on the other. I think managed to find some new ground; it’s growing as I edit and see new things, which I see as a good thing. I guess I’ll have to see in a week or so what my supervisors think of it all!