A university academic is launching a new chapter in the arts offering of a Derbyshire town.
Jennifer Allsopp is one of the driving forces behind Belper Book Club which will meet for the first time on December 4 at No 28 in the Market Place.
Monthly get-togethers will continue to be held there on the last Thursday of the month from January 2025.
Jennifer, 37, moved to Belper in 2023 after living in Florence and Rome where she worked as a visiting professor for a year. An academic at the University of Birmingham where her primary research concerns refugee policy, she previously worked for two years at Harvard University and more than a decade in Oxford.
“I found Belper to be a really thriving small cultural community,” she said. “One of the ‘must haves’ on my moving list was that the town would have a local bookshop so I was thrilled to find Dormouse Books. I was also really excited by the range of events on at the community hub No 28 Belper which includes comedy nights, pop up art classes and foreign language conversation evenings. I was nevertheless surprised to find that such a bustling artsy town didn’t have a book club. I studied literature for my first degree and am a huge bookworm.
“I contacted Stephanie Limb, the owner of Dormouse Books who was happy to collaborate so we put some feelers on social media to see if there was any interest – there was! Our post got over 100 likes and lots of positive comments and at the recommendation of the community we chose six books to kick us off that are a mix of classics and modern fiction by local and international authors.
“We’re kicking off with Frankenstein since it’s one of my favourite books. People think it’s a horror story which in some ways it is, but it’s also a very romantic tale about the human need for love, care and companionship. Mary Shelley herself suffered greatly in her life including being sidelined by her husband Percy Shelley and undergoing multiple miscarriages and one way of reading the book is to see Frankenstein’s creature as an expression of her own desperate desire to love and be loved – about how when we’re denied that love we can turn in on ourselves and become lonely and bitter. In Frankenstein’s creature – I’m loth to call him a monster – we see that absence of connection and love taken to the extreme. The creature is abandoned by its creator and shunned by the community when it tries to form bonds, an experience that many stigmatised people can relate to today. Most people will have an old school book of the text kicking around at home and because it’s so familiar it seemed a good place to start.
“The next session we’ll be reading the latest novel by local author Ian McGregor, Lean Fall Stand which discusses how a couple navigate the explorer husband’s brain injury and then we’ll be covering some award winning international authors including Min Jin Lee and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We’ll also be reading Wuthering Heights for which we’re planning an accompanying walk in the moors where it was set.
“Each month we’ll come together to discuss the book and our thoughts and feelings around it.
“We’ve already had around 30 people sign up so we’ll likely break into two smaller groups. Number 28 is the perfect space for an event like this. People can bring snacks and wine and get to know their neighbours in a welcoming environment while exploring new worlds. I can’t wait to get started!”
Jennifer is an author whose latest publication documents a year that she spent reading Dante’s Divine Comey with refugees in Italy. She said: “I would never have thought a 21 year old refugee would be moved to tears by Dante’s experience of exile some 700 years ago but that’s the power of the written word – it transcends place and time and gives us a new vocabulary to discuss our own experience through empathising with that of the characters or author. Who knows what the people of Belper will find in their literary travels and what points of connection with cultures past and present.”
This post was originally published on here
