ABSTRACTThe association between Austen’s novels and escapism is nowhere more marked than in the trenches of the Great War, as British soldiers retreated into, and sought solace from, her writing and, implicitly, an idealised past. A century after shell-shocked soldiers yearned for the vanished world of Pride and Prejudice, the self-reflexive interplay between past and present in YouTube fanvids and Jerusha Hess's Austenland demonstrates that Austenian escapism has evolved. Such productions complicate and question the very notion of “escapism”, as well as Rudyard Kipling's sentiment that “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place”. The combination of “heritage” shots with “pop” music, for example, establishes the past as idealised and yet contemporised, while Austen’s “world” is upheld and undermined as an idyll, both on screen and on internet “discussion boards”. Using Austen’s reception in the Great War as a reference point, this essay will focus on a selection of YouTube fanvids, alongside Austenland, and will cast new light on the author’s afterlives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, interrogating the complex interplay between hypotext and paratext, past and present, in the Austenian flight from “guilt and misery”.

ABSTRACTThis essay traces the difficulties over more than forty years in recovering an accurate “female biography” of Mary Hays. In doing so, I explore the intellectual and affective relationship between the female biographer and her female subject. Mary Hays was known as a peripheral associate of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin when I began my doctoral research in 1969. Even the discovery of an archive of her correspondence and other papers in private hands in London could not dispel the “buried life” she seemed to live as she grew older. The recent extensive research of Dr. Timothy Whelan into the papers of Henry Crabb Robinson and his circle reveals that Hays was at the center of a Unitarian network of learned women, and that her later life was in fact filled with family and friends who appreciated her generous generativity, especially two generations of nieces. Whelan's discoveries made it possible to track the intrusions and deletions of a series of earlier editors into Hays's own accounts, attesting to the complex responses and representations of one female figure by another. I suggest that these twin interrogations make further recovery necessary.

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the contributions of Catherine Ann Dorset (1750–1817) to the genre that Mary V. Jackson has termed “papillonades.” These stories in verse, which feature groups of animals that host and attend social gatherings such as balls, satirize adult social behaviors and pretensions in addition to cleverly presenting animal behavior. Although now largely obscure, Dorset found great success with The Peacock “At Home” (1807), which sold over 20,000 copies. Peacock and The Lion’s Masquerade (1807), much like Smith’s children’s books, demonstrate an interest in shaping young readers as future members of society. I argue that, although Dorset’s satire appears to mock social norms and nationalism, it actually serves to reinforce a conservative perspective. These works establish a world in which ritual must be preserved in order to maintain harmony, suggesting that the proper functioning of society and government is dependent on all members’ obedience to their codes—even as subtle predator–prey jokes hint at a darker world of human enterprise. My paper also seeks to explain the varied reception of her work (from commercial success to current obscurity) through its examination of Dorset’s seemingly inconsistent politics.

ABSTRACTRecent critical attention has been paid to Agnes Strickland’s significance as a historian and to Susanna Strickland’s role as a chronicler of Canadian settlement. But the activities of the two sisters and their siblings as authors of children’s books have received less attention. Elizabeth, Agnes, Jane Margaret, Catherine, and Susanna Strickland wrote over sixty works for children in the 1810s and 1820s. Jane Margaret’s biography of her sister Agnes says they “found in juvenile works the means of obtaining a little ready money.” Michael Peterman suggests that the family recognised the potential of two markets simultaneously: “gift-book annuals” and “short readable stories for children and adolescents.” Jackie C. Horne describes such works as occupying a lacuna in the critical historiography of children’s literature. This article uses the Strickland family as a means of characterising this literature: moral but at the same time rational and factual; sympathetic to the perspective of the child and intent on the construction of affective family relationships; concerned with civility and external behaviour rather than interiority; intensely, scientifically aware of the natural world in all its detail and pedagogical potential; finding in the human world a focus for compassion and social action.

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a selection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical fictions by anglophone Welsh women writers and other women writers sympathetic to Wales, focusing on Emma Robinson's Owen Tudor: An Historical Romance (1849), L. M. Spooner's Gladys of Harlech; or, The Sacrifice. A Romance of Welsh History (1858), Elizabeth Gaskell's “The Doom of the Griffiths” (1858) and Allen Raine's Hearts of Wales: An Old Romance (1905). Both women and Wales have been notably absent from theorizations of the development of the historical novel, in part because the focus on the work of Sir Walter Scott has led to an emphasis on an Anglo-Scottish model. In contrast, this essay explores the way that these women writers represent Wales in order to reshape narratives of national identity and explore notions of male and female heroism. All four writers invoke the figure of Owain Glyndŵr as the leader of the last major rebellion against the English, while two also feature the figures of Owen Tudor and Henry Tudor as the founders of the Tudor dynasty. They examine the national and personal consequences of betrayal and defeat. Excluded from mainstream historiography, these female writers turn to other modes of writing in order to reinsert both women and Wales into history.

ABSTRACTThis article looks at some still relatively neglected travelogues by the Anglo-Scottish novelist and traveller Elizabeth Isabella Spence (1768–1832). Focusing principally on Spence's final book of travels, Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland (1817), the article places this work in the context of the contemporaneous fashion for writing about Scotland and argues that some of the most significant of Spence's influences were other women, including the poet and essayist Anne Grant and Jane Porter, author of the bestselling novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810). While Spence's work shares some of the typical preoccupations of other Scottish travelogues of the day—from antiquarianism to reflections on the sublime—it is markedly different from them in its evocation of and dependence on a social network of female intellectuals. This article argues that Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland creates an unusually feminocentric version of the Romantic-era Scottish tour: it is addressed to Porter; it draws on prior work by (among others) Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton; and it features detailed descriptions of encounters with the Aberdeen working-class poet Christian Milne and the novelist Christian Isobel Johnstone. Unfortunately for Spence, that aspect of her work also fuelled a devastatingly satiric Blackwood's review that turned her into a laughing stock.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the unpublished travel diaries of Susan Horner, an author and scholar who has been neglected in contemporary research. Horner wrote two meticulously organized journals about her sojourns in Italy from 1847 to 1848 and 1861 to 1862. Her journals, currently housed in the British Institute of Florence, represent important examples of nineteenth-century scribal and material culture. Through an examination of both text and image, this essay analyses Horner's self-representation as an avid intellectual traveller and demonstrates the ways in which her manuscript journals display a remarkable scholarliness, analytical approach and concern for factual accuracy. Horner's presentation of an intellectual self is a discursive feature aimed at bolstering the author's credibility and underlining her authoritative knowledge of Italy. Horner's writings also indicate the interconnection between script and print mediums: her diaries enabled her to articulate and refine her intellectual views, and paved the way for the more public scholarly authority Horner later achieved in her published writing.

ABSTRACTKatherine Philips’s poetry survives in several early manuscript and printed sources. While these witnesses have been extensively studied by literary scholars, much about their textual origins and relationships remains unclear. In this article, the authors apply computational methods to analyse such aspects of these witnesses as similarity, compilation and organization. The authors also consider how use of such methods can shed light on long-standing literary questions about Philips's poems.

A review of Carol Stewart's 2014 Chawton House press edition of Eliza Haywood's The Invisible Spy.

ABSTRACTThis article evaluates key London productions of Restoration drama over the last 50 years and addresses how directors envisage the future of Behn’s plays on the twenty-first-century stage. Discussion includes past revivals of plays marketed as Restoration entertainment, the connection between modern productions of Behn and today’s theatrical landscape, and the potential opened up by unconventional performance spaces. The analysis seeks to determine whether the creative environment and audiences’ awareness of Restoration drama are ripe for carefully considered revivals of Behn’s plays. To date, has her work been performed with enough impact to garner the widespread attention of modern London audiences?