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What would happen if Emma did not get her Knightley? Or Elizabeth her Darcy? Will readers read novels where what Howard Jacobson refers to as ‘the bone of redemption to chew on’ is less than evident? Dr Clare Morgan, director of Oxford University’s master of studies in creative writing and author of A Book for All and None, is joined by Professor Susan Sellers, professor of English at St Andrew’s University and author of Vanessa and Virginia, to discuss the difficulty of offering a tough, non-redemptive novel in the contemporary market place, and the pressure on writers to produce certain kinds of endings.

Drawing on literary predecessors as varied as Jane Austen, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka and P. D. James, Morgan and Sellers will share with the audience the challenges, the solutions, and the excitements of writing such fiction, in relation to their own published and forthcoming work.