You really couldn't write it

The once-benign Royal Society of Literature has become a bearpit of generational and gender conflict. Rowan Pelling investigates what led the esteemed RSL into such ugly chaos

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For British authors, becoming a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) has long meant that your most illustrious peers have agreed that you have written at least two works of exceptional literary merit. Wordsmiths as different as Nick Cave, JK Rowling, and former archbishop Rowan Williams are recent fellows. Once formally invited, the writer attends a ceremony where they select the pen of a deceased luminary (Lord Byron, George Eliot, or even Charles Dickens’ quill) to sign their name into the Roll Book of Fellows. They are then eligible to mingle at the annual RSL summer party with the likes of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

For more than 200 years, the RSL, founded in 1820, has glided along like a Jane Austen tea party. Established under George IV, the early presidents included bishops, a prince, a baron, and an earl. Tory grandee Rab Butler was one long-serving president, as was Roy Jenkins. But while the society’s early history reads like an established old boys’ club, things gradually evolved.

In 1908, the first women fellows, Alice Meynell and Margaret Woods, were elected. In the 1960s, the RSL officially became a charity, and finally, in 2017, it had its first woman president, Marina Warner. For years, the society was based in an elegant building on Hyde Park Gate — “like walking into a Turgenev novel,” one insider told me. However, failing to secure the lease, it has since moved to more modest quarters in Somerset House, while its archive was sold to Cambridge University Library.

All these changes, however, feel minuscule compared to the seismic shifts and controversies of recent years, setting the scene for a stormy annual general meeting yesterday. There has been outrage, backbiting, copious leaks, and claims that the organisation was on the brink of collapse.