In collaboration with Jantar Publishing, we are delighted to welcome Jana Náhodilová, Susan Reynolds and Julia Sutton-Mattocks to discuss the classic novel 'The Grandmother' by Božena Němocová, first published in 1855, and newly translated by Susan Reynolds.
It's a deliciously subversive tale of rural life, in which Grandmother cooks, looks after her grandchildren, tells them whimsical stories and offers her neighbours advice on everything from relationships to recipes, herbal remedies and dancing. Her seemingly simple stories are infused with a charming and subtle form of early Feminism.
Božena Němcová was a Bohemian writer of the final phase of the 19C National Revival movement. In addition to being a hugely important author and journalist, she was an important campaigner for educating young girls and co-founded the first Girls’ Grammar School in Prague.
Jana Náhodilová is chair of the British Czech and Slovak Association and Czech and Slovak School in London. She holds a PhD in Czech Literature and Nationalism from UCL.
Julia Sutton-Mattocks is a Lecturer in Russian and Czech Literature at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include the dis/continuities between late nineteenth-century culture and the interwar period; and transnational European Modernism and the Avant-garde.
Susan Reynolds was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she won a scholarship to read Literarae Humaniores. Her other translations include Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, poems by Apollinaire, Jan Neruda and Jaroslav Seifert, as well as Theodore Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer: Correspondence 1923-1966 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020) and Kytice by Karel Jaromír Erben (Jantar, 2025).
We hope you can join us for what promises to be a fascinating evening!
