Address to the Keats-Shelley Association of America

January 6, 2018

I am very grateful to those who selected me. This recognition brings me much happiness.

In reflecting about the role that the Keats-Shelley Association of America has played in my life I am led to the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence, who used the term “tribe” when referring to her fellow writers. In more modern par-lance drawing upon the culture and wisdom of Indigenous peoples, the K-SAA is a Nation of scholars whose lands transcend national boundaries and continents, and which embodies the phrase “All my relations.” Mary Shelley herself seems to have ever longed for a circle with whom she could have a meeting of minds; it struck me powerfully when I read Emily Sunstein’s account of how delighted Mary Shelley was when she was invited to breakfasts at Samuel Rogers’s, about which she wrote, “of such intellectual fascinating society I have had too little in my day.” Her 1831 Preface to Frankenstein remembers her conversations with Shelley and Byron during the summer of 1816, and within the novel itself Victor learns the sorrows of disconnection. When he is about to depart for Ingolstadt he quotes the phrase from Charles Lamb about “old familiar faces.” Tonight we note the absence of familiar faces. I miss the faces of my teachers at the University of Toronto—my dissertation supervisor Milton Wilson, whose brilliant book on Shelley and writings on Byron earned him a Distinguished Scholar Award, and Jay Macpherson, who introduced me to Mary Shelley and to Thomas Love Peacock in a seminar based on her brilliant book The Spirit of Solitude. I miss friends who left too soon—Lorne McDonald, with whom I went to graduate school, and A. A. Markley, who was a good and selfless friend to many of us. I wish we still had Betty Bennett and Charles Robinson, whose book on Shelley and Byron profoundly influenced my dissertation as well as my teaching of Romanticism as an ongoing dialogue among writers. I was pleased that Charlie included me in the friendly emails he would send about a new publication or an upcoming Byron conference. Charlie’s work on Frankenstein is a gift, and I draw on his work when I teach bibliography and textual editing and can talk with knowledge about Frankenstein’s editors, including Marilyn Butler, Susan Wolfson, Nora Crook, Johanna Smith, Maurice Hindle, Lorne McDonald—with all of whom I tell students I have shared conferences. Donald Reiman’s versioning has also been deeply influential to my view of editing. I am grateful to my University of Saskatchewan emeritus colleague Anthony Harding as someone who joins formidable scholarship with a sense of sharing. He is an example of how nations of scholars are ones whose boundaries are open— it is through the Wordsworth conference and Grasmere that I know Charles Rzepka and Marilyn Gaull.

And I am glad that there are familiar faces present I can thank. First must be Stuart Curran, whose Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis I bought as a used copy at Blackwell’s (and thrillingly it was signed by Stuart) when I was a graduate student looking at manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and first met Dr. Barker-Benfield and wrote to Lord Abinger for permission to quote, kindly granted via postcards. I keep a postcard from Stuart in his beautiful hand about the manuscript I sent to the Keats-Shelley Journal in my early days as a scholar. Many years later at a conference in Neuchatel in a talk about the contributions that J. R. de J. Jackson made to women’s writing, Stuart included me among Canadian scholars who followed his example, and I was fortunate to be present to hear his talk. I am enormously grateful to Stuart for his books and his editing, including his work on Charlotte Smith. And that makes me think of a newer acquaintance with Beth Dolan. The conference on Mary Shelley he co-organized with Betty Bennett in New York in 1997 truly changed my life as it created friendships with Greg Kucich, Jeanne Moskal, Gina Luria Walker, Michael O’Neill...