The Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures
“Auden and Isherwood: Their Religious Wars and Their Secular Harmonies”
The Isherwood-Bachardy 2024–2025 lecture will be delivered by Edward Mendelson on May 1, 2025. Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and W. H. Auden’s literary executor.
The lecture is free, but reservations are required.
In the 1930s, before W. H. Auden returned to the Anglicanism of his childhood and before Christopher Isherwood became a Vedantist, they already differed in their views of religion, and those differences helped to shape the plays they wrote in collaboration with each other. In the 1940s and after, after their collaboration ended, they continued to explore their religious differences in letters and conversation, and those differences helped to shaped their work and thought throughout their lives.
This talk, which will make use of unpublished material in the Huntington’s collections, explores the ways in which Auden and Isherwood insisted on disagreeing over religion while preserving their affection and admiration for each other as writers and as persons.
The Isherwood-Bachardy Lectures at the Huntington Library allow distinguished academics, writers and artists to initiate new discussion inspired by the personal and artistic achievements of life companions Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy.
Past Isherwood-Bachardy Lecturers include Pico Iyer, Tom Ford, Edmund White, and Armistead Maupin.