As Coastal Senior College (CSC) continues to expand its role in the active lifelong learning community in Lincoln and Knox counties and beyond, the College kicks off the winter 2026 semester on Jan. 13 with a varied collection of four- to six-session courses, both in person in a variety of settings and on Zoom. 

Registration for all courses opened on Dec. 16 and reservations are expected to be high based on past history. 

Published poet and university instructor in literature, film, and creative writing, Charisse Gendron, has designed a course titled “‘With Great Skill but in a Minor Key’: Mid-Century Women Writers of the British Isles.” 

Two-time Booker Prize winner, Dame Hilary Mantel wrote in 2016: “Until very recently, there was a category of books ‘by women, for women’. . .. [that] included works written with great skill but in a minor key, novels that dealt with private, not public, life . . . Understated, neat, they do not employ what Walter Scott called ‘the Big Bow-wow strain’. . . Though authors such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield opened up a new way of witnessing the world, good books by women still fell out of print and vanished into obscurity. . . In the 1980s, feminist publishing put them back on the shelves.”   

Gendron notes that her course “will comprise four such fine but under-read books, tucked chronologically between the experimental period of Woolf and Mansfield and the feminist period of Fay Weldon, Erica Jong, and company (although championed by them)." Written by women born in Ireland, England, and Scotland, they are “The Country Girls” (1960), by Edna O’Brien; “In a Summer Season” (1961), by Elizabeth Taylor; “A Severed Head” (1961), by Iris Murdoch; and “The Girls of Slender Means” (1963), by Muriel Spark. Although composed in the unflashy style described by Mantel, these books reflect the changing sexual mores of the post-war period with psychological complexity.

The course is offered in six, two-hour Zoom sessions on Thursday afternoons from Jan. 15 to Feb. 19.  

Information about CSC and registration for the Winter Term courses may be found at coastalseniorcollege.org.