A Personal Anthology, by Raffaella Sero

I write this sitting in the gardens of Newnham College. Bathed in the buttercup blaze of May, the world in its present form looks especially unrealistic, even by Cambridge standards. In a minute or two I will stand up and I will walk through the white doors of the Sidgwick building (“curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick”, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s description) and through the courtyard past Sylvia Plath’s Stone Boy with Dolphin, to seek the cool of Newnham Library, and a corner to type the last words of my PhD thesis. I have been a graduate student at Newnham for the better part of the last six years. Lately, I have been imagining the day I’ll step into the Porters’ Lodge, or through the Pfeiffer Arch, and I’ll look around, a mere memory; I, of course, will be the memory; I won’t belong here anymore. So I write this personal anthology for myself, for that day: a breadcrumb trail of stories, all somehow linked to this place, to magic myself back to myself: to the time I called Newnham home.

‘Home’ by Shirley Jackson (First published in The Ladies Home Journal, August 1965. Collected in Just an Ordinary Day, Bantam Books 1997)

There is a little hut in Newnham gardens, between the college and the Old Labs, sheltered by trees and shrubs, where one can, if so inclined, disappear. I used to sit there, on rainy days when it wasn’t too cold, to read stories; Shirley Jackson’s were my favourite. They went well with the gloomy atmosphere. It never stops raining in her short story ‘Home’, in which a young couple move into an old house in the country. The house itself isn’t haunted, but the road that leads to it might be, by a little child and an old woman, standing in the rain, demanding to go back, to go back, to go back…

‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Virginia Woolf (Based on two lectures delivered by Woolf at Newnham and Girton colleges, first published in 1929 by the Hogarth Press. Now widely available, including as a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Feminism Short Edition)

But, you may say, we asked you to put together an anthology of short stories — what has that got to do with ‘A Room of One’s Own’? When I was thirteen and I first picked ‘Una Stanza Tutta Per Sé’ (as it’s translated in Italian, in which I read it), Woolf’s seminal essay did not read as an essay, it read as a story. Alive with details, despite the static promise of its title, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ follows the journey of the “I” (“a convenient term for somebody who has no real being”) wherever she is allowed, and beyond. It’s not a paper about women and fiction; it’s the epic tale of women and fiction. As such I remembered it, years later, when I first set foot in Woolf’s imaginary “Oxbridge”. Like her “I”, I quickly found all the places I could not go, the grass I could not walk on, the books I could not read; granted, because I was a 16-year-old Italian tourist with hardly any English, and not because — like Woolf’s “I” — “ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction”; still, a closed door is a closed door, and it feels like one.

‘Stone boy with Dolphin’ by Sylvia Plath (First published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Faber 1977)

‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ is about the rather ugly statue of a winged little boy holding (or strangling, depending on your perspective) a big fish, supposedly a dolphin. The statue is currently in a corner of a square internal garden in Newnham, leading through the Sidgwick building to the new Library. Invisible in spring, hidden away by the thick foliage of the surrounding bushes, in the winter the boy stands out as the sole inhabitants of the stark, cold, empty garden. It is winter in Plath’s story; “the February air burned blue and cold”. As it follows its protagonist Dody through her day, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ cracks through the shiny, icy surface of a student’s social life and reaches for her loneliness, one of Cambridge’s more ephemeral ghosts. I have a memory of looking for the statue in the main college garden (as per Plath’s instructions), then of finding it in its present location. I wished, like Dody, to develop a habit of “brushing the snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy”, but it doesn’t snow in Cambridge like it used to in 1957. Anyway, as I said, the statue had been moved.

‘Nostalgie’ by Wendy Erskine (First published in The Irish Times and available to read online here. Collected in Dance Move, The Singing Fly 2022)

Decades before the beginning of ‘Nostalgie’, Drew was with a woman named Delphine, whom he hasn’t seen since, but he keeps thinking about: “The time spent recollecting being with her adds up to more than the actual duration.” Throughout the story, titled after a song Drew released when he was young, ‘Nostalgie de la Boue’, the present is translucent, skin-thin; you can see the past, personal and collective, slide snake-like underneath it, threatening to break through. I read ‘Nostalgie’ on my laptop, one afternoon in Newnham Library, to the sound of other people typing.

‘Morpho Eugenia’ by A. S. Byatt (Published in Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus 1992)

A. S. Byatt is a Newnham alumna; there aren’t many corners of the college in which I haven't read her work. One night, killing time in a friend’s room while he finished his work, I remember casually picking up Byatt’s introduction to ‘Memory: An Anthology’, and being moved almost to tears by her description of remembering her grandmother remembering her girlhood. Like all of Byatt’s prose, it made words into something exceptionally physical, a seamless translation of matter into memory; the novella ‘Morpho Eugenia’ shares this magic touch, whereby flesh is made word. It follows the story of young entomologist William Adamson, shipwrecked out of his life as a researcher in the Amazon into the far more slippery territory of an upperclass Victorian family. Placing ants warfare beside William’s reluctant attempts at loving and being loved, wrapping in clouds of butterflies arguments on the existence of a divine creator, the story perfectly captures the tension between body and mind which animates all of Byatt’s work.

‘Abortion, a Love Story’ by Nicole Flattery (First published in Show Them a Good Time, The Singing Fly 2019)

The text of ‘Abortion, a Love Story’ “went to press before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play performed”. Flattery’s story thus begins, and remains, open to interpretation; unlike most shows that require audience participation, however, this story actually works. It’s funny, vulnerable, brilliant, and it contains one of the most memorable lines in literature, delivered by a girl called Lucy to a packed audience during “showtime”: “See my problem with all of you, and that has always been my problem, is that I just don’t like any of you very much and I never have, you bunch of pricks.” I can’t remember whether I’d started doing theatre in Cambridge when I read this sentence, one lunchtime in Newnham Hall, but I do remember reaching for a pen and writing it down, in the middle of a light blue sheet of paper, and placing it on the front of my notes binder, like a mantra or a charm; it’s still there.

‘Love & Friendship’ by Jane Austen (First published in Juvenilia, Chatto and Windus, 1922)

Recently, for the 250 anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, a group of Newnham undergraduates organised a day of celebrations in the Old Labs in Newnham. We had tea and talks, cake and country dance, and we read ‘Love & Freindship’aloud together, as God and Austen had intended. The greatness of this short novella is that, along with many of Austen’s ‘Juvenilia’, it feels like a satire of her more mature and well-loved works. Laura’s description of her depth of feeling anticipates and rivals Marianne Dashwood’s “A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my friends, my acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my fault, if a fault it could be called.” The romance is there, along with the scathing study of recklessness, wickedness, greed, but it’s all — eye-wateringly — funnier.

‘Blood Rites’ by Daisy Johnson (Published in Fen, Jonathan Cape, 2016)

Some would say ‘Blood Rites’ is about cannibalism; I would say it’s about female friendship. Vowing to never let their food ruin their lives again, three young women move from Paris into an old house on the edge of the fen, where they start picking men from the local pub in order to eat them. This might strike you as somewhat morally questionable, except the narrator’s first person plural has already taken you into the mentality of the group: “When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin.” The house where I lived in Newnham, with fifteen other women and the ghost of Sylvia Plath, was also old and on the edge of the fen. Like the house in ‘Blood Rites’, “it was a stupendous house, a house that knew how to feel.”

‘The Old House at Home’ by Jeanette Winterson (First published in Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, Mind Over Matter, on 18 November 2021 and available to read here. Collected in Night Side of the River, Jonathan Cape 2023)

All the stories in ‘Night Side of the River’ toe the line between technology and the occult, virtual reality and paranormal activities, to question the reader’s perception of the world we bewilderingly live in. ‘The Old House at Home’, an atmospheric ghost story set in New York, collapses these apparently distinct planes of existence, as it collapses timelines, and ‘the living and the Dead. That old binary.’ There were rumours of Sylvia Plath’s ghost haunting Whitstead, of course; in my last year living in the house, someone’s girlfriend said she felt a cold presence in the third floor bathroom. But we talked of “Sylvia”, or “Sylvia’s ghost”, as the benignant genius of the place, our household god. Reading her description of the house in her journal, in her letters, made us more aware of its history, that the lives of countless others had unfolded there, that they would continue to do so after we were gone. Like the house in Winterson’s story, Whistead was (is) “a Miss Havisham house pinned in its own past.”

‘Kitchen’ by Banana Yoshimoto (First published in Kitchen, Faber 1997)

“The place I like best in the world is the kitchen.” After sharing a kitchen with fifteen other girls (plus Sylvia Plath), it’s nothing short of a miracle that I feel the same. But Yoshimoto’s story captures everything that is magical about sharing a kitchen, no matter how messy, dirty, crowded. It follows Mikage Sakurai in and out of lonely spots, as she finds companionship in cooking, warmth in the glow of a refrigerator. People and places, however fleeting in Mikage’s life, are sharply defined in Yoshimoto’s luminous prose: “The kitchen window. The smiling faces of friends, the fresh greenery of the university campus a backdrop to Sotaro’s profile, my grandmother’s voice on the phone when I called her late at night … All of it. Everything that was no longer there.”

‘The world with love’ by Ali Smith (First Published in Free Love, Virago, 1995)

In ‘The world with love’, a woman bumps into an old schoolmate and her three children, fifteen years after school is over. Smith’s “you” shows little nostalgia for the days of old (just as well: beware of adults who miss high school, or university … ), but the old schoolmate “reminds you so much of the girl you knew that your head fills with the time she smashed someone’s guitar by throwing it out of the art room window”. Then, she says something that brings back a flood of memories, of French class, of a dark-haired girl, of words that “flashed through your head in other tongues, their undersides glinting like quicksilver”. I first read ‘The world with love’ in the common room in Whitstead, a place that doesn’t exist anymore, since the house was renovated. Smith’s story knows that the past is always a place you can’t go back to.

‘Nobody’s Empire’ by Belle and Sebastian (In the album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, Matador 2015)

Many songs are short stories in disguise; ‘Nobody’s Empire’, by Belle and Sebastian, is one of them. You can just see the “I” of the first line, remembering the “girl that sung like the chime of a bell”. The narrative arch of their story stretches in mysterious directions, as its narrator remembers the future, and the girl (now a mother of two) “marching with the crowd, singing dirty and loud”. It reminds me of my room in Whitstead, the window open onto the garden, on the edge of Newnham grounds; the safest place to dream from. The lyrics unfold against the bright texture of the music, radiant as a moment that’s just about to become memory: “If I had a camera I’d snap you now/ Cause there’s beauty in every stumble”.

* Raffaella Sero is a theatre-maker and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, published in numerous journals including the Honest Ulsterman. Her short story ‘Loveliness’, about the student house where she lived with fifteen other women and Sylvia Plath’s ghost, is part of the anthology Pathway. Her latest play ‘Love (and other languages)’ premiers at the Omnibus Theatre in London in June 2025. She is completing her doctorate in English at Newnham College, Cambridge.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall (Galley Beggar, 2014 and, in the US, Tivoli Books, 2025), and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.