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NOAH COMET Introduction: The Legacy ofAnne Mellor NNE MELLOR HAS CHANGED WHAT AND HOW WE READ AS SCHOLARS OF TARomanticism. As we reflect on her retirement, we honor her with new scholarship inspired by hers and in the spirit of her cheer and camaraderie in print, at conferences, and in the classroom. The essays here—by those who have known Anne as a friend, as a teacher and professional mentor, as an in­ tellectual influence, and as a devoted colleague or collaborator—draw upon the resources and energy of her work and project a future from which her influence sees no retirement. Some of these essays were previewed at a Clark Library conference held in Anne’s honor over two fun and stimulat­ ing days in October 2012. Anne’s scholarly adventurousness and her critical commitments have taught us so much about so many things, including Blake’s evolution as an artist, the paradigm of “English romantic irony,” the “genders” ofRoman­ ticism, the feminist uses of historicism, and innovations in pedagogy. Her groundbreaking work on women writers, especially, has been a major force in transforming Romantic studies over the last quarter century. For re­ searchers of my generation, whose professional lives began in the aftermath of fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Romanticism & Gender (1992), Mellor’s Romanticism is and has always been our Romanticism, seeded in the pioneering anthology, Romanticism and Feminism (1988). Nevertheless, we still feel the transformative power of her work every time we confront earlier scholarship that ignored what she subsequently made so un-ignorable. Between the introduction to Romanticism & Gender and the postscript to Mothers of the Nation (2000), we witness Romanticism made simultaneously whole and new again. Anne flings open the doors of a room too long inhabited only by six men, and demonstrates just how the conversations of and about Romanticism change once women reenter. Many women writers of the period, she explains at the outset of Romanticism & Gender, “insisted on the fundamental equality of women and men,” basing their moral systems on “an ethic ofcare which insists on the primacy ofthe fam­ ily or the community.”’ This ethic, “cooperative rather than possessive,” 1. Romanticism & Gender, 2. SiR, 53 (Fall 2014)ONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 291 292 NOAH COMET extended “the values of domesticity into the public realm.” fedcbaZYXWVUTSR Mothers of the Nation focuses our attention on that public realm, tracing women’s engage­ ments with English political discourse from 1780 to 1830. In summarizing the myriad questions that those women raised about themselves and about civil society, Anne concludes with a wish whose fulfillment is already at work in her own project: “the women writers of the Romantic era should at the very least be credited with intelligently formulating [key] questions and entering them into the forum of open rational debate, into the discur­ sive public sphere.”2 Anne’s career itself adds a chapter to the story she tells of women in Romanticism. In her distinctly spirited and memorable collegiality with her peers, through her mentorship of graduate students, through her NEH seminars, and through the foundation of her longstanding Southern Cali­ fornia Romantic Studies Group, she has embodied a community—an egal­ itarian family—energized by an ethic of care and a just political purpose.3 And there is no better instance of the intervention of key questions and reasoned public debate about Romantic women writers than Anne’s own career of publication, lecturing, and teaching. Her peers agree. Anne’s UCLA colleague Felicity Nussbaum notes, “Like the women writers she studies, including especially Mary Wollstonecraft , Anne has published revolutionary thought while affirming the princi­ ples of reason and the value of deep feeling.”4 And Cliff Siskin, who along with Anne co-edits a Palgrave series that has now issued more than forty books, relates her career to intellectual sociability in the best tradition. Like Francis Bacon, he remarks, “Anne sees knowledge as an act of engagement—of nature, the world, and others. That’s why she travels so much, and that’s why every minute of that travel is spent taking up every opportunity for engagement that travel affords: every sight, on every stage, on every night, and with all forms ofhuman endeavor. To spend time...

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