About Us

The Raven Letters is a collection of essays and commentaries on English and World Literature, written with A-level, IB (Higher Level) and VCE students in mind. The Raven, who appears in a number of the essays, is a character created by Susan Hancock, an Oxford graduate who studied English Literature at Somerville after taking up a postgraduate scholarship. Before going to Oxford she completed a BA in History and an MA in English Literature from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. From 1996 to 2014 she was an examiner of the World Literature Course (Higher Level) offered by the International Baccalaureate and these essays grow out of that experience of examining a syllabus that combined a study of the English canon, from Shakespeare to the moderns, with works written in languages other than English – the Greek tragedies, the great Russian works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the explosion of texts from Europe, the Americas, India, Asia and the Pacific – ‘in short’, as Mr. Micawber might say, the World.

They have also sprung from her years of university teaching in Australia – as a tutor at Monash, then a tenured lecturer in the Department of English at La Trobe. In 1993 she decided to pursue an interest in teaching Creative Writing, first at RMIT in Melbourne and then at the Victorian College of the Arts. Since then she has published short stories and a novel; she has just finished a second novel and is now working on a third.

INTRODUCTORY

Creativity – the creativity of readers and writers, of students and their tutors and teachers, of the examiners who every year assess the work of multitudes of unknown candidates, which is a huge responsibility – this is the focus of these commentaries. Whatever the genre – poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction – the key aspect of literature is the creation of characters who take up a permanent life in the imagination – what we are looking at, all of us who read and study these works is an astonishing range of characters, women, men and children as different from one another as are Nora from The Doll’s House and Kezia from the other Doll’s House; Antigone, Medea and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Oedipus, Hamlet and Macbeth, the voices in TSEliot’s Waste Land singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells, Keats standing alone ‘on the shore of the wide world’, Shakespeare’s Pericles seeking his lost daughter Marina across the endlessly diminishing perspectives of the sea, and TSEliot imagining the same quest in his Marina – what a huge world to choose from.

I am very much looking forward to doing this together. One of the Options I will set up will invite you to send in your own suggestions about texts and topics you would like to see covered. I am especially keen to discuss particular poems and look forward to your suggestions here, across the whole range, even, should you want to, some of the wonderful West Saxon texts like ‘The Dream of the Rood’ ( but I don’t expect much take-up here, though it’s a pity as what we do have preserved from that body of work is exceptionally beautiful – so maybe in your later courses if you go to a University that offers Anglo-Saxon poetry).

I am also keen to offer an Option on what used to be called Practical Criticism – the kind of thing that gets tested when you write a commentary on an Unseen text. Poetry will be the focus – offering suggestions through the critique of a short poem or extract of a poem. How to get ‘inwards’ with poems as direct and limpid as Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’, how to combine the discussion of the sonnet form with the way meanings unfurl in a Hopkins text, how to evaluate poems as different in idiom as those of Hopkins or Herbert, how to account for the marvels of Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn’ or Dylan Thomas’ stunning ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art.’ We’ll never run out of possibilities – not with a tradition of about 1200 years duration

However, to start with I’m going to focus on fiction – namely, Chronicle of A Death Foretold, The Great Gatsbyand Camus’ The Outsider. These larger ‘events’ will help us settle into discussion mode, or that’s the idea, once I get the Q & A option set up.

And finally, a word about ‘The Raven’

The Raven is a completely fictional character who just floated in out of the atmosphere one day. I decided to keep him on – I like creating fictional characters, and I thought it might be good to have him around when a bit of variety is needed – for times when I get sick of the sound of my own voice, something you might well come to understand as you read these commentaries.

And in order to close with a voice other than my own here is a verse from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a vision of our mortal existence in time, under the hand of fate. It comes from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation from the Persian original: DONE INTO ENGLISH is what it says on the title page of my copy. Omar Khayyam, 1048-1131, was a Perisan astronomer and mathematician of great renown. Whether he wrote all of the verses is not entirely clear; some even question if he were the poet at all. But Fitzgerald’s translation in 1859 was an instant success and you will see from the glamour of these lines why this was so. The verse might seem to have a negative meaning but it is a call to action not to despair and the beauty of it tells you that straight away. Here it is

That Moving Finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

So let’s do this, together, zusammen, ensemble, insiemi –Let’s get cracking, OK.

Susan Hancock.

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