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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
National

Michelle Obama to return to inner-city London school on Monday as part of her book tour

Aspiration: students at Islington's Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School greet First Lady Michelle Obama in 2009 (Picture: Reuters)

Former First Lady Michelle Obama is to return to the north London School she spoke at in 2009 on Monday.

Ms Obama visited Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington on her first visit to the UK as first lady, nine years ago.

She will revisit the school to give a talk on the importance of education as part of her book tour, according to the MailOnline.

The former first lady wrote about her experience talking at the school in her new memoir Becoming.

Michelle Obama at Islington’s Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in 2009 (AP)

She said that she had been in the White House for two months and had felt at times “overwhelmed by the pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about our children, and uncertain of my purpose.”

In a moving passage, she details how watching pupils perform a Shakespeare scene, a modern dance, and a “beautiful rendition” of a Whitney Houston song, “something inside me began to quake”.

“I almost felt myself falling backward into my own past,” she adds.

“You had only to look around at the faces in the room to know that despite their strengths these girls would need to work hard to be seen.

“There were girls in hijab, girls for whom English was a second language, girls whose skin made up every shade of brown … They’d need to fight the invisibility that comes with being poor, female and of colour.”

The school’s executive head Jo Dibb said that she became emotional after seeing what Ms Obama had written about the school.

“If we have been part of what Michelle Obama has done in the wider sphere, well, just wow.

"That makes me feel as if we've done something special.”

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