At Oxford Literary Festival 2018 author Dr Sally Bayley presented material from her recently completed literary memoir, Girl With Dove, that tells the story of a young girl escaping from an all-female household by reading.
In this interactive session, Bayley discussed the relationship between childhood reading and verbal memory. Working closely with the associations of particular words she encountered in reading Jane Eyre, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Bayley introduced a world of imaginative etymology: word plots.
Filmmaker Professor Suzie Hanna created original word-animations for this presentation. Beginning with the particular vocabulary of Jane Eyre and Miss Marple, Hanna created images that draw characters out of words; how we plot words in our mind as a means of telling graphic stories.
This event was part of a series on women in society sponsored by HSBC.