Living History: Lucy Sixsmith

My defining moment at Trinity

My defining Trinity moment happened in 2010, when I had the honour of reading George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ in chapel for graduation service.

I found being a Cambridge undergrad quite difficult. I had done a bit of sighing and pining, and a lot of raving and growing more fierce and wild at every word, by the time I stepped up behind the eagle to read. George Herbert’s words were precisely what my own vulnerability needed to hear at that moment.

But I was also filling the whole chapel with my reading, learning that women have authority and a voice. Reading from behind the eagle is extraordinary: powerful, but not an aggressively wrested power; something about the grace to be bold and confident and also to forgive yourself for being a young fool at times.

Maybe that was why, having left Cambridge vowing never to return, I find myself now back at Trinity again, hopefully less of a fool, but even if still a fool, mysteriously empowered, even in, even by, this strange world of baffling traditions and the weight of history.

I was an undergrad at Trinity from 2007 to 2010, reading English. I returned for an MPhil in 2016, and stayed to begin a PhD on nineteenth-century bible-reading practices and bibles as material texts.