Literary Festival 2013: Sarah Losh of Wreay: architect, antiquarian and visionary [Audio]

Summary: Speaker(s): Jenny Uglow | Jenny Uglow celebrates National Women’s History Month and its theme ‘women inspiring innovation through imagination’ with this talk about Sarah Losh, who built an extraordinary church in a village near Carlisle in the 1840s. As a woman innovator she broke all conventions in designing, supervising the building, and even carving the alabaster - sixty years before women architects were accepted into RIBA. She has been called ‘a Charlotte Bronte of wood and stone’, defying the gothic vogue, and creating a Romantic language of symbols, from the pinecone and lotus to fossils from local mines, incorporating new ideas from geology and science, and celebrating the buried past and resurrection of the earth.Jenny Uglow’s books include Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future and, most recently, The Pinecone.Hermione Lee is well known as a writer, reviewer and broadcaster. Her books include biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.This event is organised in association with the Royal Society of Literature. Forthcoming RSL speakers include: Emma Donoghue, Jung Chang, Hermione Lee, Richard Mabey, Alice Oswald and Robin Robertson. Please visit www.rslit.org to book or for more information. Membership of the Royal Society of Literature is open to all. This event forms part of LSE's 5th Space for Thought Literary Festival, taking place from Tuesday 26 February - Saturday 2 March 2013, with the theme 'Branching Out'.