John Rignall is one of the unsung heroes of the Fellowship and we are delighted that he accepted our invitation to lay the wreath for the Fellowship. John was one of our first vice-presidents and a great supporter of Kathleen and Bill Adams during the time they ran the Fellowship, support he continued to give when I took over in 2006.
John has been editor or co-editor of the George Eliot Review since the mid-1990s and a judge of the annual George Eliot Essay Prize since its inception in 1993 and a Vice-President since 1995. He is a frequent speaker at our events and a regular leader of our study groups.
Gabriel Woolf has been a key part of the success of the Fellowship since 1969 when he did his first oneman selection of readings from George Eliot at the invitation of Kathleen Adams, then newly installed secretary of the Fellowship. In some small measure we were able to say thank you to Gabriel, for many years now accompanied by Rosalind Shanks, for those 50 years of dedicated love for and sharing of George Eliot, by inviting him to speak at the bicentenary event in Westminster Abbey in 2019 and by a special thank you presentation at the 2019 Readings, shown in the picture. He and Rosalind have taken their readings all over the world, especially to America, but because of the pandemic in 2020 we were not able to proceed with a 51st presentation. So we were delighted that Gabriel and Rosalind have agreed to present a special 150th anniversary selection of readings from Middlemarch. Also included are some personal memories of their presentations over the last five decades. It will be a unique experience. We hope Coventry residents, now enjoying the early stages of City of Culture 2021, will travel north to hear wonderful readings from the book which drew on memories of their city in the 1830s and 1840s.
