A girl, a suitcase, a wartime coming of age – professorial lecture for International Women’s Day

Dr Alison Twells will be giving a Professorial lecture on Wednesday 11th March: “A girl, a suitcase, a wartime coming of age: writing history from my Great Aunt Norah’s diaries.” 

Press contact: Emma Griffiths | e.griffiths@shu.ac.uk

The lecture will tell the story of Alison’s Great Aunt Norah, who left her a suitcase containing a collection of diaries, letters and photographs.  

Dr Twells, Professor of Social and Cultural history, said: “My Great Aunt Norah began writing her first Letts’ Schoolgirl’s Diary in 1938, when she was twelve years old, and continued until she died, at the age of 84.  As first-hand accounts of the life as an ordinary girl during the Second World War, they are a rarity. But as pocket diaries, with tiny windows that can hold little more than fifteen words a day, staccato sentences, they are sometimes difficult to interpret.” 

In the talk Alison explores how Norah’s diaries reveal a hidden history of working-class girlhood, and a young woman’s appetite for life and love amidst unexpected dangers. 

The letters and diaries tell a story of a mysterious wartime ‘love triangle' that developed from a sailor’s letter of thanks for a pair of socks that Norah knitted and sent to the Royal Navy Comforts Fund when she was 15.  

Alison will also discuss writing history from family documents and stories. When her great aunt’s diaries first came her way, she knew immediately that she wanted to write about Norah’s wartime coming of age.  

She struggled, however, to see it as ‘academic history’. It seemed to her that the academic style and voice would neither bring Norah’s diaries to life, nor enable a story that Norah would have recognised as her own. This felt important: despite more than sixty years of women’s history and ‘history from below’, we still have so few historical accounts of the lives of working-class women and girls, told on their own terms and in their own words.  

Dr Alison Twells is a Professor of Social and Cultural History at Sheffield Hallam University. She has researched and published widely, in the fields of Sheffield’s local/global history, particularly in relation to abolition and missions; Edward Carpenter and the history of sexuality; and women’s dairies, autobiography and life writing. 

Alison’s book about Norah’s ‘suitcase archive’, A Place of Dreams: Desire, Deception and a Wartime Coming of Age, was published by Open Book Publishers in 2025. 

Book a free place for the lecture.