British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community

Acknowledgments

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s A book like this one evolves over many years, and it accumulates many debts along the way. I have long enjoyed conversations in person and in correspondence with colleagues engaged in the recovery and reassessment of Romantic-era writers, both women and men. Being part of this collective activity, which seems to be pursued in every instance with uncommon energy and ingenuity, has been invaluable to me as I have tried to think my way through the issues that I discuss in this book. These issues have been central to my own scholarship for many years now, as they also have been to my teaching. Both of these activities, I have come to realize, have been dramatically and irreversibly altered by what I have learned in the process of discovering writers to whom I was never introduced in my own formal education, whose acquaintance I only made subsequently, and whose works opened up wholly new vistas on the landscape of the diverse and dynamic writing community that existed in the British Isles between the outbreak of the war with the American colonies and the accession of the youthful Queen Victoria. The result, for me, has been a wholesale rethinking of what I understand by the Romantic writing community and an appreciation of what is to be learned and gained when we reexamine from new perspectives and with new information things with which we had long been fairly confident we were familiar. Some of the results of these explorations have previously appeared, in much abbreviated fashion, in essays and articles. Some of the preliminary details about women and war, for example, appeared in a chapter in Philip Shaw’s collection, Romantic Wars (Ashgate, 2000); some thoughts about Scottish women writers appeared in my own introduction to Scottish Women Romantic Poets (Alexander Street Press, 2002); and some early musings on Irish women poets appeared in “Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period: A Different Sort of Other” (Women’s Writing 12. 2 [2005]). This book, then, is indebted to many friends and colleagues, as well as to students with whom I have worked in courses at all levels over the years and with whom x Acknowledgments I have explored many of the problems and perceptions that are to be found in the pages that follow. Among the many friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention , I need to extend special warm thanks and appreciation for many favors, many suggestions, and many insights over the years: Stuart Curran, Paula Feldman, Diane Long Hoeveler, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Mark Lussier, Anne Mellor, Joseph Wittreich , and Susan Wolfson. I thank, too, the anonymous reader for Johns Hopkins University Press who read parts of the manuscript with care and whose insightful comments have contributed to this book’s final form. At the University of Nebraska I have benefited from the patience and expertise of a wonderful interlibrary loan staff, headed by Brian O’Grady, that has helped me pursue materials from every quarter during the course of my research. I am also grateful for the steady support provided by the office of the Vice Chancellor for Research here at Nebraska, and for a summer stipend some years ago from the National Endowment for the Humanities . I have also appreciated the clear interest and care with which Michael Lonegro at the Johns Hopkins University Press has treated this project from the outset. Finally, and as always, I owe a special debt of gratitude and love to my family: to my wife Patricia especially and eternally, who has read draft after draft, patiently, perceptively, and with an unfailing sense of why this entire project has been so important to me for all these years; and to my daughters Maia and Mei Grace, who have occasionally marveled that their dad could–and would–spend so much time writing, and who have been patient, too, when that writing had to come first. ...