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Call for reviewers: BARS Review

The BARS Review is the review journal of the British Association for Romantic Studies, providing timely and comprehensive coverage of new monographs, essay collections, editions and other works dealing with the literature, history… Read more »

The Byron Journal Essay Prize

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About the prize

The Byron Journal is delighted to invite submissions to the new annual essay competition (see below for eligibility) that will be judged by a panel of experts in the field. Since its inception in 1973, the Journal has become widely read in many different countries and enjoys a major international reputation. 

This competition aims to promote scholarly work that provides new perspectives on Byron, his circle, and second-generation Romantic-period writers. We invite essays that consider Byron, or other related canonical and non-canonical figures, including influences and afterlives. We particularly welcome articles that develop original arguments across a range of methodological approaches. 

Eligibility

The competition is open to postgraduate students, untenured faculty, and independent scholars working outside the academy, and postdoctoral scholars up to three years post viva (the competition is global; there are no entry restrictions based upon nationality). The submission deadline is 1 December 2025

All essays are subject to an anonymous peer review by a panel of established experts in Romantic Studies, chaired by Dr Maria Schoina (Aristotle) and Dr Madeleine Callaghan (Sheffield). The winner will be awarded £150 and a featured publication in the Journal.

Submissions

Essays should be submitted via email to the Editor: Dr Mirka Horová (Charles, Prague): miroslava.horova@ff.cuni.cz. Please include PRIZE in the submission title.

Essays should be no longer than 7,500 and no shorter than 5,000 words (including endnotes).

Submissions should meet the Journal’s criteria for publication. Download The Guidelines for Contributors. (If you include supplementary figures with your article, please also provide alt text. For more information, see our guide to alt text.)

Contributions should be original and should not have been previously published in any form, including all forms of electronic publication. Contributors are required to assign copyright to Liverpool University Press.

Please note that your essay must conform to the MHRA style. Please consult the guide which can be found at http://www.mhra.org.uk/style.

The author’s identity must not be identifiable in any way from the essay (electronic tags, such as those on Microsoft Word, should be removed).

Only one submission per person is allowed. The panel’s decision is final.

Registration Open: Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1870

A one-day conference at the University of Sussex, Tues 16th September, 2025

Registration is now open! All welcome

This one-day conference gathers international scholars working on the intersections of print and orality in the period 1750-1870, to explore how print culture in Britain and beyond negotiated, harnessed, exploited, and regulated the powers of voice and their potentially wayward effects.

Contributions include papers and panels on:

  • oral poetry and ballads
  • typographical representations of voice
  • muteness in fiction and print culture
  • rhetorical persuasion in the French Revolution
  • American magazines in the early Republic
  • Working-class oracy and the struggle for the vote in Britain

The keynote address will be given by Professor Mary Fairclough (University of York) on ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: Apostrophe, Prayer and Voice’.

All welcome. Please register at Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print 1750 – 1870 | University of Sussex Online Shop

Full conference programme available here Eloquent Voices: Orality in the Age of Print, 1750-1870 : News and events : The Media, Arts and Humanities Research Institute : University of Sussex

BARS Digital Symposium: ‘Global Romanticism’ Programme – 23 July 2025 (UK Time; BST) 

Our digital symposium on ‘Global Romanticism’ will be held on 23rd July. This event will showcase current research on Romanticism by bringing together speakers from different parts of the world, each addressing different areas of Romantic writing, its production and intercultural connections. We welcome participants worldwide to share how they conceptualize, build up, approach, or delineate Romanticism in their culture.

Panel 1 (09:30-10:30) – Romanticism Across Cultures

Soumyarup Bhattacharjee, “Dark Romanticism and its Indian Afterlives: A Case Study of Two Contemporary Indian Horror Films” 

Bhawana Sharma, “P.B. Shelley: A Poet of Crisis, Pandemic, and Psychological Miswant”

Hsiang-Yun Rae Yang, “Localising Jane Austen’s Irony: Pride and Prejudice in Taiyu”

Panel 2 (11:00-12:00) – British Romanticism Abroad

Dilara Kalkan, “Byron’s Ottoman Impressions: Cultural and Religious Encounters in The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos”  

Tanja Bakic, “The Reception of the British Romantic Poetry in the Serbo-Croatian-Speaking Region”  

Aishah Al-Shatti, “Teaching Joanna Baillie’s ‘Lines to a Teapot’”

BREAK (12:00-16:30)

Panel 3 (16:30-17:30) – Digital and Media Perspectives

Alexander Huber, “Exploring Global Romantic-Period Poetry Digitally: The Romantic-Period Poetry Archive (RPPA)”  

Miranda Burgess, “Media History at Yuquot, 1778 to the Present” 

Roundtable (18:00-19:30) – Romantic Studies in South America

Jerónimo Ledesma, “Dupuis and Cotonet For Ever! On the Impact of Translation and Editing on Definitions of Romanticism”

Daniela Paolini, “Tracing Romantic Connections between Britain and Argentina: A Case of Transatlantic Cultural Study”

Gabriel Pascansky, “On the Concept of Dilettantism in Literary Historiography. The German Romantics and the Argentine Generation of 1880”

Mario Rucavado Rojas, “On the Illusion of a Timeless Romanticism in Midcentury Argentina”

Pablo San Martín Varela, “Hume and Herder on Ossian: Literature and Nationhood”

Stephen Copley Research Awards 2025 (Round One): Awardees Announced

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The BARS Executive Committee established the Stephen Copley bursary scheme in order to support postgraduate and early-career research within the UK. The bursaries primarily fund expenses incurred through travel to libraries and archives necessary for the applicant’s research, alongside other research-focused costs, such as (but not limited to) photocopying, scanning, and childcare. Please do join us in congratulating the very worthy winners and their projects:

Charlotte Goodge (York) – ‘“Deformity” and the Labouring Ranks in Women’s Travel Writing, c.1770—1830’

Sam Hirst (Liverpool) – ‘Curating Legacies at Newstead: Thomas Wildman’s Impact on Byron’s Legacy’

Flora Lisica (Northeastern University London) ‘Tragedy and Late Romanticism’

Zooey Ziller (Cambridge) ‘Ontological Multiplicity and the Phenomenological Aesthetics of Desire, Mourning, and Melancholia’

Once they have completed their research projects, each winner will write a brief report. These reports will be published on the BARS Blog and circulated through our social media. For more information about the bursaries, including reports from past winners, please visit our website: www.bars.ac.uk.

Dr Gerard McKeever
Bursaries Officer, BARS
13/6/25

Programme: BARS Digital Symposium: Expanding Queer Romanticisms

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25th July 2025, 3pm – 6.15pm BST

About the Symposium

This symposium brings together scholars working on all aspects of queer Romanticism, from the theoretical to the historical, and generate a discussion on the future of the field. By taking a broad approach to definitions of queerness, we will discuss Romanticism in relation to liminality, non-normative genders and transgressive sexualities. With papers discussing everything from atoms, plants and snakes to Romantic theatre, women’s Gothic and challenges to settler-colonialism, this event provides a focal point for work on queer Romanticism that is often hidden within other fields.

The symposium is open to all BARS members – a Zoom link will be circulated to the membership ahead of the event.  If you would like to attend, you can join BARS here.

Programme

All times given are in BST (UTC+1:00)

15:00 – 15:10: Welcome and Opening Remarks

15:10 – 16:30: Panel 1: Deviations

Chair: Matthew Sangster

James Metcalf – Queering the Clinamen: Ann Yearsley’s Atoms and the Poetics of the Possible

Rebekah Musk – ‘A Flower’s Life’: Rethinking Queer Temporalities in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘A History of the Lyre’

Matteo Schiavone – ‘She Weepeth On Eternally’: Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Abandoned Women as Queer Characters

Greta Colombani – Queering the Snake Woman: Non-Normative Identities and Desires in John Keats’s ‘Lamia’ and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘The Fairy of the Fountains’

16:30 – 17:00: Break

17:00 – 18:00 Panel 2: Gender and Bodies

Chair: Rebekah Musk

Kate Singer – Female Sailors & Transatlantic Angst

Jolene Zigarovich – Queer Theory: Questioning the Binary

Alexandra E. LaGrand – ‘The beautiful, the elegant, the lively, Rosalind’: Eulogizing the Extraordinary Miss Walstein

18:00 – 18:15: Discussion on Expanding Queer Romanticisms and Closing Remarks

BARS Membership Fee Increase on July 1st: Notification and Explanation

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Dear BARS,

As we announced at the General Meeting in Glasgow and when we circulated the members’ survey earlier this year, BARS is currently in a position where it needs to increase its fees, which haven’t risen since 2011.  In the past few years, we have expanded the range of fellowships and funding we offer substantially, spending down a surplus that had built up, but we are now at a point where we must raise fees to keep the association on a secure financial footing.

To guide us in pursuing a course in line with our members’ wishes, we asked about the level of fee increase we should implement in the members’ survey.  The vast majority of respondents (91.5%) were happy with a fee increase that will allow us to sustain BARS’ current level of activities, with those who favoured a larger fee increase outnumbering those who favoured a smaller increase (which would mandate cuts) by three to one.

In line with these results, the BARS Executive has determined that the fees will rise to the following levels as of 1st July 2025:

  • Waged: £37 (from £25)
  • Unwaged: £17 (from £10)

The members’ survey also indicated an appetite among some members (23.9%) for an easy means of making a larger yearly contribution to BARS; for these people, we will be setting up a new Sustaining Membership at £57.  No one will ever be obliged to pay at this level, but if you’d like to make a larger regular donation to BARS, subscribing at this level will help support additional fellowships and allow BARS to plan activities over a sustained period.

For members who have already paid this year, current subscriptions remain valid until 31st December 2025.  Please note that receiving this email does not necessarily mean that your membership is up to date.  If you haven’t yet paid your subscription for the calendar year 2025, you have until 30th June to do so at the current rates (this may be especially relevant for postgraduate and early career members attending Romantic (Un)Conciousness).  After that point, we will change the How to Join page to charge the new rates and will adjust all existing PayPal subscriptions.

If you have an ongoing subscription, you will be automatically notified when this is amended.  If you’re happy to continue as a member at the new rate, you don’t need to do anything further, but you can also cancel your subscription if you wish.  If you’d like to change the rate at which you subscribe (either because your circumstances have changed or because you’d like to subscribe at the new Sustaining Membership rate), you can cancel your subscription and then rejoin BARS using the links on the page.  For honorary members, there is no need to contact us individually.

We realise that raising fees at a time of considerable uncertainty is far from ideal, and we wouldn’t be doing so if there were other options.  However, membership fees comprise the entirety of BARS’ regular income, supporting the association’s full range of activities, from conferences to fellowships and from The BARS Review to the Digital Events programme.  Without this increase, we would need to cut back drastically.  With this increase, BARS can continue to flourish; we are confident that we will not need to increase fees again in the short term, and do not plan to review them again until 2029.

Many thanks for your continuing support, and best wishes,

Mary Fairclough (Treasurer), Yimon Lo (Membership Secretary) and Matthew Sangster (President), for the BARS Executive

Call for Contributions: Literature, Multilingualism, and the Four Nations, 1800-1900

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We are inviting proposals for contributions to an edited book, provisionally titled Literature, Multilingualism, and the Four Nations, 1800-1900, which builds on the work that we started during the AHRC-funded research network ‘Victorian Literary Languages’. The network hosted three workshops in 2022 and 2023 and is the basis for a special issue of 19 on ‘Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages’  (available here!)

The proposed volume aims to examine the intersection between literary culture and multilingualism from a distinctive four nations perspective. We hope that it will shed new light on the ways in which literature reflected and shaped the relationship between Britain’s indigenous languages; late modern English and its many variants, accents, and dialects; and the foreign languages that were spoken and heard, written and read, and taught and learnt in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

We are inviting proposals for essays of approximately 9,000 words by scholars at any stage in their career and are keen to provide a platform for new and emerging critical voices.

Please see below for further details on the topics and approaches we are specifically looking to include. If your research is not captured by the suggested topics but would contribute to the broader aims we identify, please do not hesitate to get in touch!We also welcome informal inquiries about possible contributions.

To express your interest in contributing an essay, please send your proposal of approximately 400 words to viclitlang@gmail.com by 31 July. We anticipate that full chapters will be due toward the end of summer 2026.

Please share this email with anyone in your networks, including graduate students, who may be interested.

With many thanks and best wishes,

Karin Koehler (k.koehler@bangor.ac.uk) and Greg Tate (gpt4@st-andrews.ac.uk)

  1.  Literature, Language and National Identity:

We are looking for essays that address how nineteenth-century literature in English (and any of its variants), Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or Welsh participated in the linguistic construction of national identity, with emphasis on the relationship between the four constituent nations and ‘Britishness’.

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

  • the terminology of national identity, and the relationship – and slippages – between such terms as e.g. England/English, Scottish/Scotland, Welsh/Wales, Ireland/Irish and Britain/British
  • literary resistance to, or compliance with, British unionism
  • literary manifestations of ‘tributary patriotism’
  • literary representations of and reflections on Welsh-English, Gaelic-English, Irish-English bilingualism
  • literature’s contributions to the debate about the future of ‘minoritised languages’
  • literature’s role in defining the relationship between different languages of the four nations
  • literature’s role in disseminating or resisting the terminology of e.g. ‘West Britain’ and ‘North Britain’
  • literature’s role in representing and reflecting on the relationship between regions, nations, and union
  1. Global Circulation

We are looking for essays that address how literature in literature in English (and any of its variants), Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or Welsh effects or reflects the translocal mobility of the four nations’ languages across the globe, especially – though not exclusively – in imperial and colonial contexts.

Possible approaches include, but are by no means limited to:

  • the global circulation and reception of four-nations writing in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or regional Englishes
  • literary representations of the presence and significance of four nations languages in colonial spaces
  • literature, including periodicals, in Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Scots, or English dialect writing published outside the four nations
  • literary embodiments or representation of distinctive colonial variants of four nations’ languages
  • literature as a means of making linguistic community portable
  • the imposition of four nations languages on indigenous populations and/or the relationship between four nations languages and indigenous languages

NCSA Announcement: Submissions Open for Emerging Scholars Award, Article Prize, and BIPOC Scholars Prize

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Award Submission Deadline July 1, 2025
Submissions to the Emerging Scholars Award, the Article Prize, and the BIPOC Scholars Award are due July 1, 2025. Winners will each receive a cash award of $500 to be presented at the Annual NCSA Conference in 2026. Short descriptions are below, but please refer to the links to the NCSA website for complete information and lists of recent award recipients. https://ncsaweb.net/grants-funding-awards-prizes/

The Emerging Scholars Award: https://ncsaweb.net/ncsa-emerging-scholars-award/

The work of emerging scholars represents the promise and long-term future of interdisciplinary scholarship in nineteenth century studies. In recognition of the excellent publications of this constituency of emerging scholars, this award is given for an outstanding article or essay published while the author is within their doctoral studies or within six years following conferral of their doctorate. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2024 or between January 1, 2025 and June 30, 2025 are eligible for the Emerging Scholars Award, which will be presented at the 2026 NCSA Conference. If the official date of publication does not fall within that span but the work in fact appeared between those dates, then it is eligible. NCSA encourages winners to attend the annual conference and will waive the conference registration fee. Entries can be from any discipline and may focus on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (the French Revolution to World War I), must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and must be by a single author. Submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays.

More information and link to submit articles are HERE: https://ncsaweb.net/ncsa-emerging-scholars-award/

Emerging Scholars Award Contact: Dr.Alexandre Bonafos, Chair of the Emerging Scholars Committee at EmergingScholarsNCSA@gmail.com

The Article Prize

The Article Prize recognizes excellence in scholarly studies from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (French Revolution to World War I). Entries must be published in English or be accompanied by an English translation, and submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2024 or between January 1, 2025 and June 30, 2025 are eligible for the 2026 Article Prize, which will be awarded at the 2026 NCSA conference. If the date of publication does not fall within that span but the work in fact appeared between those dates, then it is eligible. NCSA encourages winners to attend the annual conference and will waive the conference registration fee. Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays. 

More information and link to submit articles are here:https://ncsaweb.net/ncsa-article-prize/

Article Prize Contact: Dr. David Ogawa, Chair of the Article Prize Committee at ogawad@union.edu  OR ArticlePrizeNCSA@gmail.com  

The BIPOC Scholars Prize

The BIPOC Scholars Prize recognizes excellence in scholarly studies from any discipline focusing on any aspect of the long nineteenth century (French Revolution to World War I) completed by a scholar who identifies as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or a person of color). Entries can be from any discipline, must be published in English or accompanied by an English translation, and submission of essays that are interdisciplinary is especially encouraged. Articles that appeared in print in a journal or edited collection in 2024 or between January 1, 2025 and June 30, 2025 are eligible for the 2026 BIPOC Scholars Prize, which will be presented at the 2026 NCSA Conference.  If the listed date of publication does not fall within that span,but the work appeared between those dates, then it is eligible. NCSA encourages winners to attend the annual conference and will waive the conference registration fee. Articles may be submitted by the author or the publisher of a journal, anthology, or volume containing independent essays.

                             More information and link to submit articles are here: https://ncsaweb.net/bipoc-scholars-prize/

BIPOC Scholars Prize Contact: Wendy Castenell and/or Emily August, Co-chairs of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, at wcastenell@wlu.edu and emily.august@stockton.edu 

Call for Papers: the 2025 joint RSAA/David Nichol Seminar conference on “Living/Building”

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26-28 November 2025 at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The 2025 joint RSAA/David Nichol Seminar conference, “Living / Building,” is a chance to think about connections between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, the ways lives were built and made in the 18th century and Romantic periods, and the way we live and build relationships today. The conference theme draws inspiration from Te Herenga Waka’s Living Pā, the Māori meeting house, research and teaching facility on campus. The pā is a “Living Building,” meaning that it is built to high sustainability and environmental standards, as well as reflecting Māori principles of design, learning, and community.

Call for Papers

The Māori lawyer and intellectual Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, Rongomaiwahine) once said:

….for me the notion of home within kaupapa Māori [a Māori-centred approach] is a relational understanding. It depends upon relationships, and if the relationships are strong, if the ties that bind people together are secure, then whatever house they build to be at home in on their whenua [land] will be secure.

Conference participants are invited to bring this relational understanding to a wide array of topics and approaches that characterise scholarship on the eighteenth century and Romanticism in this part of the world. Proposed papers might respond to either or both of the terms “Living / Building” and topics might include:

  • Building connections between eighteenth-century studies and Romantic studies
  • Ways of living that were imagined, encouraged, discouraged, or denied in the period and its texts, artworks, and cultural practices
  • Building relationships in Britain and across the world
  • Living beings and ecosystems
  • Building communities, infrastructures, movements, collectives, and enterprises in the eighteenth century and beyond
  • Life and death, building and destroying, in the long eighteenth century

Papers on other topics related to eighteenth-century and Romantic studies are also very welcome. We particularly welcome papers on pedagogy in these fields.

Abstracts and Bursaries

Please send abstracts of 200 words, with a short bio note, to Nikki Hessell (nikki.hessell@vuw.ac.nz) from 1 May. Decisions will be made as soon as possible, to allow people to apply for funding and make travel plans. The final deadline for abstracts is 1 July 2025.

A small number of AUD$500 travel bursaries are available for postgraduate, early career, and precariously employed presenters. If you would like to be considered for one of the bursaries, please indicate this in your bio note and explain your eligibility.

For more conference details, please see the conference website: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/fhss/about/events/living-buildinga-joint-rsaadavid-nichol-smith-conference

Nothing in this World is Hidden Forever: Vindicating the Hidden Figure of Harriet Geddes

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by Belén Fernandez Crespo

Harriet Geddes (Hagley 1790-Worcestershire 1868) was the wife of William Collins—painter and Royal Academician—and mother of Wilkie Collins—novelist, playwright, and sensation writer. Harriet’s contribution to her son’s tutoring and education has been widely acknowledged by scholars: she not only encouraged Wilkie’s early reading, but she also supported his theatrical tastes, which prompted his friendship and literary partnership with Dickens; she made her collection of Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic romances available, which may have influenced his sensation novels; and she helped launch her son’s literary career by assisting him in the publication of Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, a successful biographical account edited in 1848 in two volumes by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. However, her own talent has been systematically silenced and rendered invisible. Her true story has never been told, for the accepted version—repeated to exhaustion by Willkie Collins’ biographers—presents her as a devoted wife and mother. In this blogpost, I not only intend to vindicate the importance of the hidden figure of Harriet Geddes,1 silenced by patriarchy, but also to give her the recognition and visibility she deserves. Drawing from her unpublished autobiography, I will seek to understand the personality and aspirations of an intelligent, brave woman forced to live in the shadow of her husband and son.

As a talented actress, Harriet dreamt of performing at The Theatre Royal (Bath), and she would have traveled there to request a trial from the manager had she possessed the necessary funds. However, it was the influence of an Evangelical clergyman— a Mr. Marsden as he appears in her fictionalized memoirs—that thwarted Harriet’s theatrical inclinations and her desire to become an actress—one of the few paths that would have allowed her to express herself and live an independent life. Mr. Marsden and his wife “saved” Harriet from the evils of acting, for becoming an actress would have brought about certain ruin. It was demanded of Geddes to waste her potential as a talented performer and instead work as a governess—a socially acceptable occupation for a woman—to support her improvident family, even if she lacked the proper qualifications due to her limited education. When, after having worked for several families and finally managing to feel comfortable as a governess Harriet secured a position in a household where she was well paid and her work was genuinely valued, it was her husband-to-be, William Collins—a strict Evangelical who deemed it unsuitable for women to earn their livelihood—who forced his courageous, determined fiancé Harriet to retreat into dependence, take up the expected role of a married woman, and become invisible. From the domestic sphere, Harriet took different roles as a supporter and patron of her son and as a mailing intermediary between rebel, bohemian Wilkie—who resisted becoming a lawyer to pursue his dream of writing—and his strict, conservative, and religious father. Patriarchy transformed Harriet into a speaker for its discourse when she scolded Henrietta Ward2 for not giving up her work as a painter to devote her life to her children; patriarchy controlled Harriet’s mind so deeply that it inhibited her from expressing3 any deep thoughts or personal asides in her published diaries (Clarke 25), which hinders us from learning about the desires and aspirations of a strong and capable woman.

Six years after the death of her husband, Harriet Geddes produced an unpublished manuscript4 “based on her life as an artist’s wife” 5 (Clarke 78). The manuscript was a fictionalized biographical account of her childhood and youth, and it portrays her rise from poverty to affluence, her struggle to become a valid governess, and her becoming the economic supporter of her parents and younger sisters. Harriet’s manuscript is a bildungsroman that depicts her growth from a thoughtless young girl concerned only with pleasures such as balls and parties, to a perseverant, independent, wage-earning woman.

Harriet sent her manuscript to Collins, seeking advice on how to make it publishable. She meant to express herself, to raise her voice and tell her story in her own words. The manuscript shows Geddes as a talented writer, capable of articulating her insecurities, dilemmas, and unyielding spirit. However, Collins did not find his mother’s work appropriate, so he tried to modify and improve it by instilling his own essence into it. If published, the manuscript would have been ascribed to him, for he mentioned he would sign it himself. Harriet appears to have acquiesced—yet another example of the suppression of a woman’s identity taken for granted by women themselves (Peters 298). Wilkie Collins got down to cutting and rearranging Harriet’s manuscript for some time, but he eventually seems to have abandoned the project6 (Peters 153): no more will be heard of Harriet’s manuscript, which will be assumed to have disappeared (Peters 298). Harriet’s autobiography remained unpublished, unsigned, and unnamed: once again she was thwarted in her inclinations, invisibilized, and silenced. Headed as “April 25th, 1853” (Peters 298), it has been cataloged as by Wilkie Collins. Today, it remains unpublished and is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.



ENDNOTES

  1. I will use Harriet’s maiden name to erase her invisibility and vindicate her as an independent individual: a strong and capable woman who shines with her own light.
  2. Henrietta Ward (1832-1924) was one of Wilkie Collins’ friends. She was a Victorian artist coming from a family of painters. She was known for her portrait paintings and genre scenes.
  3. One piece of evidence that may suggest Harriet’s resentment toward her imposed lifestyle is her long struggle with “nerves,” which led her to convalesce with her parents, visit friends, or take the waters. According to Lycett, (Andrew Lycett, Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation, Random House, 2013), there is no indication that Harriet had any creative outlet, and her afflictions were not uncommon among women navigating life in a male-dominated, industrial society (30).
  4. Harriet Collins, MS; cataloged under Wilkie Collins, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas.
  5. Clarke, William Malpas. The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins. Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
  6. Peters, Catherine.” ’Invite No Dangerous Publicity’: Some Independent Women and Their Effect on Wilkie Collin’s Life and Writing.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 20, 1991, pp. 295-312.