THS London Lecture 2027

Saturday 9th January 2027
Starts 15:00 until 16:00
University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT

London Lecture 2027

Annual Talk at University College London

Date: Saturday 9th January 2027
Time: 3pm
Speaker: Mark Ford
Venue: The Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre at UCL
Price: £10 per person

This year's London Lecture will follow the annual wreath-laying ceremony at Westminster Abbey.

Mark Ford will present "Saying At Last You Knew! Knowing in Thomas Hardy"

The phrase “saying at last you knew!” concludes Thomas Hardy’s 1913 poem A Night in November, published in his 1922 collection Late Lyrics and Earlier. In Mark Ford’s critical study "Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry". This dynamic of “knowing” and late-arriving realization represents the core emotional tragedy of Hardy’s elegies for his first wife, Emma. The line encapsulates an elusive, posthumous moment of shared understanding that never materialized in life and Mark Ford will present his research and findings that projects an imagined reconciliation where the dead partner finally comprehends the full depth of the speaker's complex, ambivalent, or remorseful interior state.