'George Eliot and the Difficulty of Reaching Conclusions'

Commemorating Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1903), alumnus, sometime Fellow and Tutor and later Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, this prestigious lecture on 'some literary subject, including therein criticism, biography and ethics' was established in 1905 and first delivered early in 1907.
Elected every other year, recent Lecturers have been Dame Hermione Lee, Colm Tóibín and Claire Tomalin.
A literary scholar, biographer and cultural historian, Rosemary Ashton is an alumna of Newnham College, where she was a PhD student, and is now Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, University College London. A Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, she is also a Vice-President of the George Eliot Fellowship.
Professor Ashton's life of that author was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and she produced the entry in the latest Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  Having published on Anglo-German cultural relations and the cultural history of London, Rosemary Ashton was principal investigator in the Bloomsbury Project, a major multidisciplinary study of the area during the Nineteenth Century, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Her most recent book, 'Victorian Bloomsbury', appeared in 2012.
All are welcome at the Lecture. Senior members of the University attending should wear gowns.