Creating the Future: An Evening with Sarah Watling

In celebration of Women's History Month, Waterstones Cambridge is putting on a series of events exploring women and books – women's lives, writings, and representations. Join biographer Sarah Watlingas she discusses her book Tomorrow Perhaps the Future – an incisive and exciting group biography that interweaves the stories of various female outsiders who resolved to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War. She will be in conversation with Dr. Roseanne Webster, social and political historian and JRF a Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

Sarah Watling weaves together the paths of the American journalists Martha Gellhorn and Josephine Herbst, the British writers and partners Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, the aristocratic rebel Jessica Mitford, and the maverick poet Nancy Cunard, drawing on their responses to the Spanish Civil War in both literature and life. She considers the wary position of Virginia Woolf, trying and failing to keep the conflict out of her family, and searches out the stories of African-American nurse Salaria Kea, Jewish photographer Gerda Taro and others, tracing their decisions to face up to history. For each woman, Spain became a defining episode of her life, where many of them found a freedom unthinkable at home.

By weaving together the lives, work and activism of these women, Watling has created a historical masterpiece. Intimate yet expansive, explosive yet human Tomorrow Perhaps the Future is set to become a key text on the Spanish Civil War as well as the histories of rebellion and liberation.

Watling's work is history made human, she reminds us of the ordinary people living in extraordinary times and how each of us shape and are shaped by our circumstances. She places women back into the historical record, refusing to allow their stories to be obscured or ignored. In our age of political divisions and war, Tomorrow Perhaps the Future asks questions of solidarity, resistance and the arts, while exploring how we respond to the need to declare a side, and how we know when that moment - the moment to step forward - has arrived.

Don't miss your chance to hear one of the most exciting British writers working today as she sheds new light on a little known period of European history. Watling will answer your questions and sign copies of her books.

Book signing to follow.

Sarah Watling is the author of Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters, for which she was awarded the Tony Lothian Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London.

Dr. Roseanne Websteris a social and political historian with expertise in gender, popular politics and international movements. She was a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence from January to June 2022. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.