PhD Project: The portrayal of the lower middle classes in the novels of EM Forster and Virginia Woolf.
Supervisors: Dr Nicola Wilson, Professor Steven Matthews (Reading).
Lawrence Jones is a first-year doctoral student in English literature at Reading University and is being supervised by Dr Nicola Wilson and Prof Steven Matthews. Lawrence completed his MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London in 2019. His MA dissertation topic examined Virginia Woolf’s engagement with the ‘common reader’ during and after the publication of her experimental 1931 novel, The Waves; it also analysed her portrayal of the lower middle classes and working classes in the drafts and published version of the same novel. For his thesis, Lawrence will be expanding on his MA research by focussing on the portrayal of the lower middle classes in the novels of EM Forster and Virginia Woolf. He will also examine these authors’ engagements with this class in their work as critics and publishers.