Programme with Abstracts

Edgy Romanticism / Romanticism on Edge – Saturday 9th April 2016

Programme

9.30-10.00: Registration and Coffee

10.00-11.00: Keynote 1: Nick Groom: The Edge of Ruin: Archipelagic and Catachthonic Romanticism

11.00-11.15: Coffee Break

11.15-12.30: Panel 1: Romantic Travel

Chair: Michael Bradshaw

1. Elizabeth Edwards: Layered Landscapes – Travel Writing as Romantic Geology

2. Emilee Morrall: “Willingly on the Margin”: Charlotte Smith and the Borders of Romanticism

3. Julia Coole: “Who Shall Now Lead?”: The Notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Rewriting of Albania

12.30-1.30: Lunch

1.30-2.45: Panel 2: Women Writers on the Edge

Chair: Steve Van Hagen

1. Bethan Roberts: Charlotte Smith on Edge

2. Anna Fitzer: Fashionable Connections: Alicia LeFanu and Writing from the Edge

3. Diane Duffy: Anna Eliza Bray, 1790-1833: A Woman on the Edge

2.45-3.00: Tea Break

3.00-4.15: Panel 3: Edginess in the Godwin-Shelley Circle

Chair: Tara Neary

1. Richard Gough Thomas: A Fantasy of Submission: Rousseau, Godwin and the Sexual Politics of Pain

2. Merrilees Roberts: Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces

3. Claire Sheridan: Mary Shelley on the Outskirts of London: A Transpontine “Last Man”

4.15-4.30: Coffee Break

4.30-5.45: Panel 4: Re-thinking Romantic Generations

Chair: Andy McInnes

1. Steve Van Hagen: On the Edges of the Edges: James Woodhouse in the Press, 1763-65

2. Alex Broadhead: Counterfactual Lives and Coleridgean Consubstantiality: The Romantics Reimagined

3. Michael Bradshaw: ‘What Silence Drear in England’s Oaky Forest’: Myths and Boundaries of a Third Romantic Generation

5.45-6.00: Break

6.00-7.00: Keynote 2: Susan Civale: Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby Robinson

Followed by a Wine Reception

Abstracts

Keynote 1: The Edge of Ruin: Archipelagic and Catachthonic RomanticismNick Groom – University of Exeter

This paper considers Romanticism in terms of racial migration and history,

seventeenth-century political theory, Whig cultural identity, legitimacy, and

commerce. By examining uses of race, heritage, and region I will explain how

antiquarian historical theories are incorporated into developing notions of cultural

identity. In particular, this approach adds a temporal dimension to the spatialities of

archipelagic thinking: historicizing archipelagic understanding to develop a

catachthonic approach that analyses the historicity of historiographical theories of

nationality and identity, effectively through a doubled, or subterranean, history.

Biographical Note: Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter.

His most recent books are The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), The

Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year (Atlantic, 2013 - shortlisted for the

Katharine Briggs Folklore Award and runner-up for Countryfile Book of the

Year), and editions of The Castle of Otranto and The Monk for Oxford World's

Classics (2014 and 2016, respectively). His next book is a collection of essays for

OUP co-edited with Nicholas Allen and Jos Smith: Coastal Works: Writing at the

Atlantic Edge.

Panel 1: Romantic Travel1. Layered Landscapes – Travel Writing as Romantic GeologyElizabeth Edwards – Research Fellow, University of Wales Centre for Advanced

Welsh and Celtic Studies

This paper presents work-in-progress from the ‘Curious Travellers’ research project,

which is currently (2014-18) reassessing late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-

century home tourism. It begins with a study of William Smith’s 1815 geological map

of Britain, and takes the theme of geological layering, as revealed by Smith, as a

method for approaching the Romantic-period domestic tour. Home tours were often

written by travellers not known to us today beyond the manuscript tours they left, and

some of them might be understood today as middlebrow texts now finding their time

alongside new studies of magazines and popular novels. Tours from the period

survive in their hundreds, but as an archive they can seem generic in form and

content, collectively homogenous. Focusing particularly on unpublished tours of

Wales, this paper suggests ways of reading that archive, via the concept of layering,

that bring out the individual characteristics of each and every home tour. Dealing

with the least-researched of the ‘four nations’, and with a form whose popularity in its

own time is now little recognised, this paper surveys the current ‘edges’ of literary

Romanticism in terms of both geography and genre.

Biographical Note: Elizabeth Edwards is a Research Fellow at the University of

Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth. Her publications

include English-Language Poetry from Wales 1789-1806 (University of Wales Press,

2013) and Richard Llwyd: Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems (Trent Editions, 2016).

She is currently working on a monograph on Wales and eighteenth-century women’s

writing.

 

2. “Willingly on the Margin”: Charlotte Smith and the Borders of RomanticismEmilee Morrall – Liverpool Hope University

In Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784-1807 (2011),

Jacqueline Labbe discusses the Romantic nature of, and similarities between, the

poetry of Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, claiming that both literary figures

“[were] equally central to the formation of Romanticism” (17). She also notes,

however, that “by 1833 Smith [had] become a footnote to Wordsworth’s own

compositions” (5); it appears, therefore, that Smith’s position as a Romanticist has

altered over time, to the point that she has become situated at the periphery of

Romantic studies. My paper will expand upon the seemingly peripheral nature of

Smith’s work in order to discuss the ‘edgy’ locations in her novels, and examine her

depictions of geographical borders.

It is difficult to discuss Smith’s writings without commenting on her explicit

engagement with edges and boundaries, as is evidenced in Charlotte Smith:

Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (2003), in which Labbe claims that

Smith’s poetry “repopulates the margin […] until the edge becomes central” (137).

My paper will expand on this notion through an analysis of Smith’s novels, in

particular Celestina (1791) and Montalbert (1795), and will consider depictions of

spatial margins and edges, such the boundaries of home estates. In considering

Labbe’s notion that Smith repopulates and centralises the margin, I will also explore

the relationship between the marginalised status of Smith’s protagonists and the

geographical borderlands where they are often situated, in order to examine the

significance of such ‘edgy’ locations in the works of a writer at the periphery of

Romantic studies.

Biographical Note: I am a first-year PhD student in the English department at

Liverpool Hope University, on a Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship. My PhD research

considers the representation of adolescent characters and depictions of space and

travel in the novels and children’s literature of the eighteenth-century writer,

Charlotte Smith. My research interests include the presentation of domestic and rural

locations, female mobility and agency, and depictions of travel around Europe in

eighteenth-century literature. I am currently in the process of writing a journal article

based on a paper I recently presented at the Difficult Women conference at the

University of York, which focuses on the roles of male and female hunters, the use of

space in hunting techniques and the notion that women are perceived to be

marginalised and animalistic prey in Smith’s novels.

3. “Who Shall Now Lead?” – The Notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Rewriting of AlbaniaJulia Coole – Keele University

In both his published works and “private” life, Lord Byron continually stretched the

established boundaries. Never did the two more neatly meet than in Byron’s

European tour (1809-11), which famously produced the material for his most

celebrated work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18). Here, not only did Byron

extend his social boundaries to include acquaintances with Albanian aristocracy – Ali

Pasha – but also expanded the itinerary of the traditional ‘Grand Tour’ to include

areas of land previously unmarked by British boots. As Byron describes in his notes

to Canto I of CHP: “Circumstances, of little consequence to mention, led Mr

Hobhouse and myself into that country [Albania] before we visited any other part of

the Ottoman dominions; and with the exception of Major Leake […] no other

Englishman have ever advanced beyond the capital into the interior” (p.87). But

Byron’s pioneering leaked into his creative efforts. CHP consists not merely of the

well-known poem, but also a sizeable collection of appended notes on his travels,

the people, and geographic material which extended and corrected previous work on

the area by other writers. Byron continually revised and updated these notes in each

subsequent edition to ensure that the factual material was kept up to date and

correct. In doing so, Byron sought to dispel and correct myths relating to European

people which were perpetuated by previous accounts. These notes are to be the

focus of the paper. I will argue that Byron used this corrective method to both

underwrite previous travel narratives (and cultural assumptions), whilst cultivating his

own writing method to create new, accurate cultural representations.

Biographical Note: Julia Coole is a first year PhD student from Keele University.

Her thesis explores the medium of travel writing and its effect on cultural

representations and national identity. Her main focus is on the writings of Lord

Byron and Washington Irving, and their efforts to cultivate fresh ideas of cultural

identity through frequented modes of narrative.

Panel 2: Women Writers on the Edge1. Charlotte Smith on the Edge 

Bethan Roberts – Lancaster University

This paper will explore the much-discussed place of Charlotte Smith (1784-1806) in

‘Romanticism’ and in ‘Romantic’ literary history, through her most widely read and

anthologised sonnet: XLIV ‘Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789).

Many of Smith’s sonnets are set around or describe an ‘edge’, with several taking

the coastal headland or sea shore as a setting. This paper argues that these settings

reflect Smith’s sense of her (marginal) place in relation to literary tradition, and also,

in turn, have come to inscribe that place, as a poet who fell into literary neglect after

her popularity in the late eighteenth century. The churchyard setting of Smith’s XLIV

is on the very ‘margin of the sea’, as Smith’s note to the sonnet tells us, and

attracted a number of commentators and artists to the site – including John

Constable – following its publication, as the church gradually disappeared into the

sea. As well as considering how Smith places herself in sonnet XLIV, this paper will

consider the responses it inspired, to track Smith’s critical fortunes and her place at

the ‘edge’ of Romanticism. 

Biographical Note: Bethan Roberts is an associate lecturer at Lancaster University.

Her PhD was on Charlotte Smith and the sonnet, and was completed in 2014 at the

University of Liverpool. She has published journal articles on Smith and is working

on turning her PhD thesis into a monograph. She currently teaches ‘Romantic

Literature’, ‘Victorian Literature’ and ‘Contemporary Literature’ at Lancaster and has

started work on a new research project on the nightingale in the poetry and science

of the long eighteenth century. 

2. Fashionable Connections: Alicia LeFanu and Writing from the Edge

Anna Fitzer – University of Hull

Alicia LeFanu was the Dublin-born granddaughter of the novelist and dramatist

Frances Sheridan, and member of a literary dynasty further distinguished by the

theatrical and political dealings of her uncle, Richard Brinsley. Between 1809 and

1836 she published several poems, six multi-volume novels, a critical biography of

her grandmother, and several articles for the Court Magazine. Contemporary critics

made much of her genuine hereditary talent but, by the mid-nineteenth century, the

Literary Gazette misleadingly assimilated her into a different ‘tribe’ – that of ‘the

petticoat novelists who long since enriched the Minerva Press’ with their eminently

forgettable fiction.

This paper develops work I have previously undertaken as editor of LeFanu’s

first novel, Strathallan (1816), and of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs

Frances Sheridan (1824), which explores her complication of ideas of the centre and

the periphery. In focusing more specifically upon the edges of LeFanu’s page, this

paper examines how this interest is figured in LeFanu’s use of the chapter epigraph.

Derived from a range of sources dating from classical antiquity to her own

contemporary moment, LeFanu’s quotations persist across her fiction as a

dimension in which the writer not only reflects upon literary legacies, but also

contests the boundaries of her own print culture. Though this paper concentrates

upon LeFanu, it also aims to consider the significance of her example for a broader

understanding of other women writers ‘at the edges and borders of Romanticism’,

and of their literary networks.

Biographical Note: Anna Fitzer is editor of Strathallan (Pickering & Chatto, 2008), a

novel first published in 1816 by Alicia LeFanu. She is also editor of the four-volume

Memoirs of Women Writers Part 1 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), which incorporates

LeFanu’s 1824 biography of Frances Sheridan, and early nineteenth-century studies

of Hannah More and the children’s author and educationalist, Sarah Trimmer. She is

currently engaged in biographical work on the Sheridan and LeFanu families, and is

Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth Century Literature at the University of Hull.

3. Anna Eliza Bray, 1790-1883: A Woman on the EdgeDiane Duffy – Independent Scholar

Eliza Bray can be viewed as a Janus figure looking backwards at a Romantic past

and forwards to a developing Victorian England – a woman on the edge. Her

positioning on the temporal limits of Romanticism was reinforced by her geographical

location on the margins of English metropolitan society, in a country vicarage on the

western edge of Dartmoor. In terms of genre and gender Bray was also writing from

the margins. Her work can be read as a development from Scott’s historical

romance, but while Scott’s fictional world was plausible enough to appear real,

Bray’s fiction used real family history and accurate depictions of landscape, custom,

traditions and material culture. Her commitment to accuracy sprang from her desire

to preserve the past, but it meant that as a woman she must access detailed

antiquarian research which was traditionally a male domain. Similarly Bray’s forays

into the writing of political history contravene the modest reserve expected of

women; Bray herself associates politics with masculine characteristics. Bray, I argue,

managed her challenging position as a writer on the edge of propriety by framing her

antiquarianism and political comment within the regional and domestic, which looks

forwards to the Victorian conception of domesticating Romanticism’s extremes.

Bray’s work was also cutting edge as her region, which retained the last vestiges of

Old England’s cultural traditions, can be viewed as a microcosm of the English, not

British nation, and can therefore be read as an English National Tale.

Biographical Note: After graduating from the University of Manchester with a PhD

in 2011 I have pursued my research on history and identity in women’s writing from

the first half of the nineteenth century giving a number of conference papers on

editing women’s autobiography, women’s travel writing and antiquarianism in the

historical novel. At present I am involved with the Elizabeth Gaskell House in

Manchester where I am currently researching textual alterations to Gaskell’s first

biography in addition to examining new evidence surrounding the death of Letitia

Landon.

Panel 3: Edginess in the Godwin-Shelley Circle1. A Fantasy of Submission: Rousseau, Godwin and the Sexual Politics of Pain Richard Gough Thomas – Manchester Metropolitan University

In The Confessions, Rousseau expressed his desire to devote himself to a woman

and submit himself to her will. By contrast, he had argued in Émile that a woman's

role was to complement a man's strength and that women who commanded were

usurpers of a masculine role. In his novel engaging with these two works, Fleetwood

(1805) William Godwin had his protagonist praise the inequality of marriage and

claim that a powerless woman inspired her husband to greater care and sensitivity.

Godwin's narrative proves this belief to be a chimera, as the protagonist's territorial

feelings drive him to madness. This presentation will explore the contradiction of

Rousseau's position and Godwin's commentary on them in the context of modern

theories of Dominant/Submissive (D/S) relationships. It will argue that Rousseau

constructs a "fantasy of submission" by which the specificity of his submissive

scenario is in fact an unconscious attempt to control his situation in the face of his

perceived social impotence. Fleetwood addresses the same behaviour but Godwin

offers only further questions about dominant and submissive roles in gender

relations. Stephen Bruhm’s much-cited work on Fleetwood foregrounds the

protagonist’s psychological suffering and its relation to the period’s understanding of

torture. This paper seeks to draw a parallel between that reading and Rousseau’s

confession of both sexual desire and shame at having sought out corporal

punishment as a child.

Biographical Note: Richard Gough Thomas is an Associate Lecturer at Manchester

Metropolitan University. He completed his PhD thesis on the educational theory of

William Godwin in 2015. He is the current lead editor of the open-access

journal, Dark Arts. He tweets as @RGoughThomas.

2. Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s PrefacesMerrilees Roberts – Queen Mary

My paper will explore the way Shelley’s prose prefaces reflect his complex

engagement with a triad of interrelated concerns he believed allowed poetry to

explore the limits of the self: psychology, aesthetics and ethics. Shelley’s prefaces

imply that he chose dramatic situations for his poems that would inspire ethical

conflict and confusion in their readers, one reason for this being to catch out

excessively didactic moralistic responses which have yet to be softened by the

benevolent feelings he believed poetry could inspire. The Preface to Alastor is

particularly complex in its manner of posing the question of whether there is a

correlation or slippage between sympathy conceived as a morally relevant emotional

reflex and sympathy seen as an abstract, disinterested artistic sensitivity which,

curiously, Shelley also wanted to claim can instigate moral awareness. It claims that

‘they who keep aloof from sympathies with their kind […] are morally dead’, whilst

also implying that ‘exquisite’ motions of the sympathetic imagination might, despite

Shelley’s own theory of poetry’s innate relationship to ethical expansiveness, be of

direct moral relevance only when these occur inside people who are psychologically

robust enough to harness the power of their own purely artistic sensitivity. Studies of

Romanticism increasingly address these sorts of issues through cultural history

approaches, but I propose that Romantic writing itself harbours the suspicion that

there is a Subject or mode of selfhood that exists at the limits of, and in constant

tension with how we theorise the self through various philosophical discourses.

Biographical Note: I am a second year (part-time) PhD Student in English at Queen

Mary working on ‘Reticence in Percy Shelley’ with Professor Paul Hamilton. My

thesis examines the significance of moments in Shelley’s work where reticence - that

which is unspoken, obscured, withheld, or made to speak in a register other than the

discursive - is a key tactic in Shelley’s poetics. I develop a phenomenological

approach to reading Shelley’s major works based by Wolfgang Iser’s theories on the

productive functioning of textual gaps and omissions to demonstrate how, by

destabilising their own processes, Shelley’s poems produce dynamic inter-subjective

experience.

3. Mary Shelley on the Outskirts of London: A Transpontine ‘Last Man.’ Claire Sheridan – University of Greenwich

George Dibdin Pitt is best known as the playwright of The String of Pearls, familiar to

us as one of the most influential versions of the Sweeney Todd story. But among this

prolific playwright's other productions is a comic domestic melodrama called The

Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green, which was first performed at the Surrey

theatre in 1833. The recent Broadview edition of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last

Man carries an excerpt of Dibdin Pitt's Last Man, chosen for its close verbal parallels

to passages of Shelley's novel. Previous critics have noted other similarities between

the works, such as the presence of a black dog—also linking both works to Byron's

Darkness. My paper will discuss the play as a demotic adaption of Mary Shelley’s

Last Man, making her already edgy apocalypse edgier by locating it in South

London. The action of Mary Shelley’s novel takes place in Windsor: Dibdin Pitt nods

to this idea of outskirts by situating his play in Eltham - also on the edge of London

but in the opposite direction. By looking at its performance history and reception, I’ll

argue that Dibdin Pitt’s play, aimed at a working class audience, highlights the edge

where Romanticism shades into popular culture.

Biographical note: I recently joined the department of literature, language and

theatre at the University of Greenwich, as lecturer in Gothic literature. Before that I

taught for several years at Queen Mary, University of London, where I completed my

Ph.D. in 2012. My doctoral research focused on survival and sociability in the

Godwin-Shelley circles. I have published work on memoirs by William Godwin and

Amelia Opie, the idea of sole survival in Godwin’s novel St Leon, relationships in the

‘Pisa-gang’ after Shelley’s death, and comedy and nostalgia in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On

the New School of Reform.’

Panel 4: Re-thinking Romantic Generations1. On the Edges of the Edges: James Woodhouse in the Press, 1763-65Steve Van Hagen – Edge Hill University

Labouring-class poets and poetry have – until recent decades – arguably constituted

a subject at the edges of more canonical concerns within Romantic scholarship. If

so, the centrality of newspaper and periodical culture to the careers of the figures

within labouring-class culture, and to their representation and promotion to a wider

public, has similarly been a focus that has been relegated to the margins of scholarly

enquiry. This paper aims to counter this neglect of an important approach to this

vibrant and vital tradition within Romantic culture by focusing on press

representations of the prolific ‘Shoemaker Poet’, James Woodhouse (1735-1820),

who has emerged in recent decades as a central figure within the recovery of

eighteenth-century labouring-class poets. To reconsider Woodhouse’s career

through the prism of representations of him in the press in the years 1763-65 –

crucial years in his public emergence because of the publication of his first major

subscription volume Poems on Sundry Occasions in 1764 – both reinforces some of

our ideas about his early career, while dramatically challenging others. The paper

will discuss three items by or about Woodhouse in the newspapers during the period,

arguing that all of them have important things to teach us about his early career and

reception. One of them, in particular, I will argue – a letter that may have been

authored by Woodhouse himself that was published in late April 1764 in The St.

James’ Chronicle or, The British Evening Post (Issue 49) – has the potential to

dramatically rewrite assumptions about his early attitudes to his patrons, readers and

public reception.

Biographical Note: Steve Van Hagen is Program Leader for English Literature at

Edge Hill University. His major interests lie in British literature of the long eighteenth

century, especially the labouring-class poetry of the period. He is the author of two

critical studies, The Poetry of Mary Leapor and The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (2011),

and the editor of James Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus

Scriblerus: A Selection (2005). He has published articles on Woodhouse and

Stephen Duck, and his own poetry has appeared in a wide range of journals and

magazines.

2. Counterfactual Lives and Coleridgean Consubstantiality: The Romantics ReimaginedAlex Broadhead – University of Liverpool

Since the publication of Hawthorne’s ‘P.’s Correspondence’ in 1845, the lives of the

British romantic poets have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors

of alternate history. Hawthorne’s tale – the first sustained alternate history in English

– imagines a world in which Keats and Byron did not die prematurely but instead

lived to become a haunted recluse and a political turncoat respectively. Among the

many subsequent works which have recontextualised the romantics in timelines

other than our own are those of G. M. Trevelyan (1907), Elinor Wylie (1926), Harold

Nicolson (1931), William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), Orson Scott Card (1987-

present) and Susanna Clark (2004).

To date, alternate history has tended to be read as an offshoot of

postmodernist fiction. But the popularity of the romantics for writers working in this

genre suggests that its roots go back further. In this paper, which focuses on ‘P.’s

Correspondence,’ Card’s Seventh Son (1987) and Andrew Motion’s The Invention of

Dr Cake (2003), I propose that the Byrons and Blakes of alternate history are avatars

of a hybrid form of historical imagination: one that is simultaneously (but not

unproblematically) romantic and postmodern. In the respect that these works draw

attention to the constructedness of received narratives surrounding the lives of the

romantics, they presuppose a postmodern understanding of biography and history.

Yet in their sensitivity to the rich symbolic subtexts of biographical and historical

narratives (factual and counterfactual), the works follow the lead of Coleridge and

Keats. For this reason, they constitute intriguing and valuable examples of the

complex ways in which romantic historiography continues to inform genre fiction.

Biographical Note: Alex Broadhead teaches in the English department at the

University of Liverpool and specialises in Romantic writing. He is currently working

on a book-length study of representations of the Romantics in fiction and film. His

first monograph, The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity, was

published in 2014.

3. ‘What Silence Drear in England’s Oaky Forest’: Myths and Boundaries of a Third Romantic GenerationMichael Bradshaw – Edge Hill University

Generations do not have essential characteristics, but are defined structurally, in

relation to each other; generational identity is always a matter of representation and

interpretation. The idea that generations can be culturally isolated from each other,

to the extent of mutual incomprehension, is a modern convention: a rebellious

younger generation expresses itself in a radical new language that its elders greet

with bemusement, and regards the values of its predecessors with a cleansing

hostility and intolerance. Inter-generational conflict and miscommunication is a

standard of modern drama, both comic and tragic.

The specific application of the metaphor to literary tribes and movements can

be said to have begun with the Romantic age. ‘The Romantics’ and ‘Romanticism’

are retrospective organisational terms, constructed in Anglo-German literary and

aesthetic criticism in the later nineteenth century. But the Romantic generations are

not back-formations of this kind: Romantic-era writers themselves developed the

idea, constructing themselves and others – allies and opponents – within loose but

coherent groups based on age, affiliation, aesthetic taste, and above all in their

stance in relation to the sublime historical moment of the French Revolution.

Through analysis of some key examples of generational self-fashioning and

myth-making among younger writers, this paper will examine the claim for a third

Romantic generation, centring on Beddoes, Darley, Hood, and Landon. The concept

of a third generation, characterised by a pessimistic aesthetic of alienation,

anachronism, and grotesque, will help literary scholarship to better understand the

cultural transitions of the nineteenth century, and maybe even find a home for some

of Romanticism’s most compelling misfits.

Biographical Note: Michael Bradshaw is a specialist in late Romantic poetry and

drama, and has published on themes and authors such as: Beddoes, Darley, Hood,

Keats, Landor, Milman, the Shelleys, The London Magazine, Romantic fragments,

and Romantic generations. His edited collection Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind,

and Text will be published in May 2016. He is currently Head of English, History &

Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.

Keynote 2: Women’s Life Writing and Reputation: A Case Study of Mary Darby RobinsonSusan Civale – Canterbury Christ Church University

In 1780, the stunning actress and poet Mary Darby Robinson sparked a media

frenzy when she began an adulterous love affair with the teenaged Prince Regent.

Robinson then spent the bulk of her adult life transforming her public position from

sex object to writing subject. Wielding an impressive range of authorial personae in

her novels, poems, and periodical pieces, Robinson conscripted discursive self-

fashioning to secure a living and a place of prominence in contemporary literary (and

celebrity) culture. Her Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson (1801), co-written with her

daughter and published the year after death, has been read as a final—but flawed—

attempt to defend her conduct and to rescue a tarnished reputation. Instead of the

confessional intimacy or the robust social satire characteristic of her poems,

Robinson’s Memoirs narrated her life as a pathetic tale of transgression, suffering,

and redemption in sacrificial motherhood. Moreover, the narrative seems to be

destabilised by inconsistencies in structure and gaps in content which are often

discussed by modern critics as shortcomings: evidence of self-censorship, ‘confused’

intentions, or an inability to reconcile her scandalous reputation with an acceptable

feminine persona.

However, a careful examination of Robinson’s Memoirs suggests that her

conspicuous silences may be part of a nuanced strategy of self-presentation. By

flagging the fact that she is withholding information at climactic emotional moments,

Robinson evokes a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, revealing herself whilst at the

same time maintaining the privacy and mystery so important to the enduring

popularity of a celebrity. Though discussed by many scholars as a failure,

Robinson’s Memoirs remained in print into the twentieth century, spurring spin-off

novels, mini-biographies, and periodical articles which testify to the enduring interest

in and engagement with her life writing, long after her poetry and fiction had faded

from public memory. Through a consideration of Robinson’s Memoirs and her

literary afterlife in the long nineteenth century, this paper will argue for her life writing

as both innovative and influential, and will gesture to the benefits of extending the

traditional ‘edges’ of Romanticism both in terms of genre and period.

Biographical Note: Susan Civale is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at

Canterbury Christ Church University. Her research focuses on Romantic literature,

though she has interests in women’s writing of the long nineteenth century, and

especially in authorial and textual afterlives, life writing, and the rise of print,

periodical, and celebrity culture. She is currently working on a monograph entitled

Women’s Life Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Reputation and Authorship,

which is under contract at Manchester University Press. This book focuses on

Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Mary Hays, four women

writers whose auto/biographies, diaries, memoirs and/or autobiographical fiction

influenced their own reputations and also contributed to the development of the

genre of life writing in its formative period.