THE RED BOOK CLUB
The Red Book Club is a free online book club and speaker programme exploring Jungian depth psychology, mythology, alchemy, art, literature and the imagination.
After reading each book, we meet for an online group discussion.
Guest authors, academics and artists are sometimes invited to speak about a particular book or subject. Previous speakers have included Jennifer Higgie, Amy Hale, Hettie Judah, Stephen Ellcock, Carly Mountain, Elvia Wilk, Gary Bobroff, Patrick Harpur, Ann McCoy and Danny Scopelliti.
The club began during lockdown with a small group of eight people and now has over 800 members across the world. It is open to anyone interested in these subject areas. There is no obligation to read every book or attend every session. Just join in when a book or speaker grabs your interest.
The Red Book Club is free to attend. If you enjoy a particular session, one-off support is very welcome. If you value the club as an ongoing space and would like to help sustain it, you can become a supporter for £3/month or £30/year.
Support helps cover the time, preparation, admin and platform costs involved in keeping the club going.
NEXT BOOK / MEETING
Bedlam
with guest author Jennifer Higgie
In our next meet up we will be re-joined by guest authorJennifer Higgie who first came to discuss The Other Side a number of years ago. We will be discussing her book Bedlam that has been republished by Verso to coincide with the exhibition of Richard Dadd's work at the RA.
The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals
Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.
A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd’s fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd’s imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.
At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd’s voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.
Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer, editor, podcaster and curator who lives in London. She also teaches writing, including courses at the frieze academy, Dartington Trust, and the Salzburg Summer Academy.
Zoom meeting date: Friday 28th August
7pm UK time
PAST BOOKS & SPEAKERS
Click on the images below for more details
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