Name: Everything’s Fine, Nothing’s Fine: The Sad Girl Novel
Start: 2025-11-18T17:30:00+00:00
Location: Wolfson College, Barton Road, CB3 9BB Cambridge, United Kingdom

$Everything\u2019s Fine, Nothing\u2019s Fine: The Sad Girl Novel$

In 2015, i-D magazine declared the ‘Year of the Sad Girl’. In the decade since, ‘sadness’ in women’s culture has scarcely abated: from Audrey Wollen’s influential ‘Sad Girl Theory’ to Sally Rooney to the recent resurgence of Lana Del Rey we are faced with a coterie of melancholy women seemingly divested from the ideas of gender equality and emancipation that seemed so proximate not so long ago.
This talk considers why, giving an overview of the literary oeuvre known as ‘the sad girl novel’ and excavating its gendered and generational specificities. My aim is to reclaim the literary ‘sad girl’ from the wastepaper bin of literary cliché and restore her importance as a cultural artefact of this moment in late capitalist history.

Speaker
Dr Orlaith Darling is a Visiting Research Fellow at CRASSH and a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Justus Liebig Universität, Gießen, and completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin School of English in December 2023.

Details
This is a hybrid event, which will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) and also on Teams.
If you would like to attend online, please register for the Zoom link: https://wolfson-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/2XcrgkiZT-SqvoPcAm-nQg#/registration
Refreshments will be available for the in-person audience.

Access
This event will take place in the Gatsby Room on the first floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.

Contact
If you have any questions, please contact our events team - [email protected]

Wolfson Humanities Society
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics which take place every Tuesday during term time - please sign up to their mailing list to keep up to date with their upcoming events.