Richard De Ritter is a Lecturer in the Long Eighteenth Century at the University of Leeds.  He has a particular interest in women’s writing, having published articles on Maria Edgeworth and domesticity; Elizabeth Hamilton and education; and Jane West, patriotism and sensibility.  He has also written on James Boswell and William Hazlitt and worked extensively on the writings of Priscilla Wakefield.  He co-ordinates (with Jeremy Davies) the Leeds Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature research seminar and last year organised a two-day conference on ‘Home and Nation: Reimagining the Domestic, 1750-1850’.  His first monograph, Imagining Women Readers, 1789-1820: Well-Regulated Minds, which we discuss below, was published earlier this year by Manchester University Press.

1) How did you first become interested in the ways that female readers were imagined in the Romantic period?

Initially I was curious about the way that Romantic authors like Keats, Clare and Hazlitt seemed so dismissive – even fearful – of the prospect of women reading their work.  In that respect, the project was more focused on the anxieties of male authorial identity.  These writers were drawing upon stereotypes familiar from the period’s anti-novel discourse, which depicted women readers as superficial, leisured and unproductive.  But when I turned to the way women readers were addressed and instructed in conduct and educational literature, a powerful counter-narrative became apparent.  The key moment was reading Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, in which some forms of reading are described as an ‘invigorating’ form of ‘wholesome labour’.  Here was a way of imagining women readers as active, self-regulating individuals, whose practices were informed by an ethic of exertion rather than leisured indolence.  Suddenly, the stereotypical fears evoked by women readers became a secondary interest.

2) How did Imagining Women Readers develop and change as you transformed it from your PhD thesis into a monograph?

The biggest challenges went hand in hand: I needed to cut down the amount of material I had and to identify a clearer narrative.  In the thesis, I had allowed myself to explore some interesting but perhaps unnecessary tangents.  As a result, the argument was sometimes in danger of becoming obscured.  The book is more streamlined.  I also had to think more clearly about the date range I was working with.  The book stops at the end of the 1810s – a decade which is book-ended by the publication of the first and second editions of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s The British Novelists (in 1810 and 1820, respectively).  The intervening years also saw the publication of Jane Austen’s major novels.  For the book, I needed to think more clearly about how these works brought increasing respectability not only to novels, but to the women who enjoyed reading them.  I also wanted to demonstrate how this change in status was made possible by the earlier work of writers such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays.  It lent the book a coherence that the thesis was perhaps lacking.

3) The book focuses principally on three types of works: ‘conduct books, educational treatises and novels’. Did these different genres of literary work construct women readers in drastically different ways, or were there considerable crossovers between the three?

A lot of the writers I’m interested in worked across these different genres; Maria Edgeworth, May Hays, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, and Mary Wollstonecraft all published novels alongside their non-fictional work.  Often, the novels seem to enact the content of the more obviously didactic works, giving writers the chance to show theory operating in practice.  Nevertheless, fiction frequently offers a testing ground for exploring ideas about reading. Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, for instance, is informed by the proto-feminist conviction that reading helps to cultivate one’s reason – but this is tempered by the lingering presence of older, regressive stereotypes about the pernicious effects of fiction.  Hays’s novel seeks to navigate a path between these extremes.  As this suggests, novels can offer a more expansive setting for negotiating debates about women’s reading; but at the same time, I didn’t want to lose sight of the richness of ‘non-literary’ texts.  I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the rhetorical strategies they employ when discussing the virtues of reading.  In conduct books, for instance, reading is frequently depicted as an act of work, or an investment, or as involving a form of economic management.  In that respect, it contributes to the construction of a more complex and outward-looking model of domestic femininity than we might expect from putatively ‘didactic’ writing.

4) What do you think were the main social and cultural issues at stake when authors sought to imagine and define the ways in which women read?

As critics like Jacqueline Pearson and Kate Flint have shown, the figure of the woman reader is often a conduit for expressing a range of social and cultural anxieties.  This is aided by those negative stereotypes of women as flawed, impressionable readers.  Consequently, discussions of women’s reading are often situated in relation to a range of other contexts: the fear of Revolutionary France; the debilitating effects of commerce and luxury; excessive sensibility; and the regulation of female sexuality, to name just a few.  But rather than focusing on how reading exacerbated these anxieties, I wanted to explore how it offered the means of combatting them.  I focused on how a variety of writers urged women to become discriminating – even resistant – readers, who cultivated their independent judgement and reason.  From this perspective, what’s really at stake is the way in which leisure, domesticity and work are defined in relation to reading.  As I mentioned above, reading becomes a form of virtuous, domestic labour that enables women to improve themselves and, by extension, the nation.  Similarly, in the book I write about how the concept of female leisure is redefined: rather than an unproductive state of indolence, it accommodates acts of reading that confer disinterested moral authority upon women.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am working on a book about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s literature, provisionally entitled Domesticating Wonder: Women Writing for Children, 1750-1830.  There are two key strands that I’m exploring.  The first is the evolving status of ‘wonder’ in writing for children.  I’m interested in how it is reconfigured from denoting that which is marvellous and fantastical to that which is produced by children’s informed, rational observation of the world in which they live.  Isolating this shift complicates the idea that ‘rationalist’ modes of education of the late eighteenth century expelled wonder from children’s literature.  It also leads to the second strand of the project, which re-evaluates the nature of domesticity in writing for children.  I’m interested in how rationalised, domesticated forms of wonder allow children to perceive the ways in which their daily lives are implicated within a range of economic, environmental, and ethical networks.  I want to suggest that this produces a kind of cosmopolitan global consciousness that originates in the home.  Pursuing this argument has led me to critical approaches that I’ve not really used before: I’ve found it helpful to draw upon theories of globalisation and eco-critical approaches to literature.  The latter has also led me to develop an increasing interest in animal studies.  I’m enjoying broadening my horizons and have managed to incorporate elements of this project into my teaching, in the form of a module on animals in children’s literature from the eighteenth century to the present.

David Higgins is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds; he currently serves on the BARS Executive and was until recently the Editor of the BARS Bulletin & Review.  His doctoral research focused on the constructions of literary genius in late Romantic periodicals; this project formed the basis of his first monograph, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).  More recently, he has worked on diverse subjects including Romantic China, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ecocriticism and creativity (working as part of Leeds’ ongoing Creativity Project and acting as Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Creative Communities, 1750-1830’ network).  His major research project over the past few years has been an examination of the ways in which narratives of localised selfhood in English Romantic writing developed in relation to larger national and imperial formations.  This work has recently resulted in his latest monograph, Romantic Englishness: Local, National and Global Selves, 1780-1850, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in September and which we discuss below.

1) In your acknowledgements, you write that Romantic Englishness had its genesis in MA work you conducted in 1997.  How much of your thinking from this time survives in the book, and what major realisations have transformed your thinking about the topic in the intervening period?

I suppose that what survives is an interest in how micro-narratives of individual selfhood intersect with macro-narratives of nation and empire.  What I didn’t necessarily have in 1997 were the intellectual tools or knowledge of the period to make sense of this complex area.  I ended up working on a topic in which I was less interested for my doctoral thesis and first book, which may have saved me from making a total hash of this one…  I think that the main changes in my thinking have been a partial move away from psychobiography, which (unless done very carefully) always has the danger of reducing a complex text to an imagined intention or neurosis, and the development of an ecological concern with writing and place: particularly ideas of ‘the local’ and their implication in larger national and imperial formations.  This shift has been enabled, in part, by the more sophisticated ecocriticism that has emerged in the last decade or so.  My interest in the topic has also been given greater force and direction by recent political and cultural debates about the nature and value of ‘Englishness’.

2) What led you to make your primary focus ‘Romantic-period autobiography written within and about England’?

I’ve been interested in literary and philosophical constructions of selfhood since I was an undergraduate, and this interest was consolidated by an MA module that I took on ‘Romantic Autobiography’ (taught by Greg Dart).  When I came to think about a large project on national identity a few years later, I had already published articles that emerged from my postgraduate work and addressed this topic in autobiographical texts by William Hazlitt and Benjamin Robert Haydon.  Therefore, it seemed natural enough to use ‘autobiography’ as a limiting term that would make the project viable and consonant with my intellectual interests.  The focus on England emerged somewhat later, for two reasons.  First, I was well aware that a lot of important work had already been done on ‘external’ cultural encounter in Romantic travel writing and I wasn’t sure that I could add much to this.  In contrast, ‘internal’ cultural encounter seemed to me an important and under-explored area.  Secondly, I began to become particularly interested in specifically English representations as a response to the emergence of ‘Four Nations’ Romanticism and my sense that, as well as giving much-needed attention to Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Romanticism, this should also cause us to rethink our understanding of a specifically English Romanticism.

3) You contend in your introduction that ‘Englishness was a heterogeneous and unstable category in the Romantic period, and always inflected by alterity’ and point out that this has been occluded by the dominance of narratives which conflate English and British identities. What do you believe are the major perspectives we can gain by recovering a set of a specifically English Romantic-period identities?

I think that there are three answers to this.  Two relate to our understanding of the period, and the other relates to present-day concerns.  To begin with the contemporary situation, it’s clear that debates about the nature and value of Englishness have been given new impetus in recent years due to devolution, immigration, and so on.  Given the ever-present danger of taking a ‘purist’ and exclusionary attitude to Englishness, I think that it’s useful to consider its history, and particularly ways in which English identities have always been porous, complex, displaced, and overdetermined.  My first period-specific answer relates to my reply to Question 2.  Interest in ‘Four Nations Romanticism’ provides an opportunity to consider a specifically English Romantic tradition that might usefully be abstracted from a potentially statist and imperialistic notion of ‘English Literature’ that emerged in subsequent years.  Finally, I think that reflecting on the complex relationship between Englishness and place allows me to complicate the localism that has been so important to the idea of Romantic ecology.

4) Your book examines canonical Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare) and essayists (Hazlitt, Lamb and De Quincey), but also pays extensive attention to William Cowper, Samuel Bamford, Thomas Bewick and William Cobbett. How did you select this cast of writers as your principal subjects, and were there other authors you considered including?

The most obvious thing about that list of authors, of course, is that they are all white and male, although not all middle-class.  I had originally intended to write about a much larger and diverse range of texts, including slave narratives and poetry and memoirs by women.  At that stage, the study was conceived as a more general and far too ambitious account of autobiography and place in the period.  A lot of rich texts were lost when I decided to exclude foreign travel writing, including works by Byron, Letitia Landon, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft.  As my argument developed about the autobiographical construction of Englishness through representations of ‘the local’ within an imperial context, this further limited my selection of texts (although I still cover quite a lot of ground).  It’s not that female or black autobiography within England during the period is uninterested in national identity per se, but I did not generally find that these texts connected Englishness and the local.  It’s quite possible, of course, that I have missed some texts that would have worked.  In the end, I just had to go with my instincts about what was viable.  The person I most regret not including is Charlotte Smith, whom I decided to leave out quite late in the day.  Her poetry moves interestingly between local, national, and sometimes global geographies; however, I wasn’t confident enough that she was specifically concerned with Englishness rather than Britishness, or that I had room for another chapter.  Partly to assuage my anxiety about this decision, I intend to write about nation and catastrophe in her poetry as part of my next project.

5) What new projects do you plan to turn your attention to now that this one is complete?

I have a few other things to finish off, but my main focus is on developing a major project on representations of environmental catastrophe in Romantic and post-Romantic writing.  I imagine that this will keep me going for quite a few years.  The first step will be a short book entitled 1816: Empire, Climate Change, and British Romanticism, timed (I hope) to coincide with the bicentenary of the ‘Year Without A Summer’ in 2016.

Rebecca Davies is currently a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.  She completed her doctorate at Aberystwyth University in 2011, where she also held lectureships in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature.  She spent 2012 teaching at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and has also taught at Birmingham City University and Loughborough University.  Her research focuses on areas including women’s writing, epistemology, the materiality of the text, writing for children and discourses of education, concerns which are united in her first monograph, Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book, which was recently published by Ashgate and which we discuss below.

1) How did you first become interested in the implications of ‘textual mothering’?

I began this project with the realisation that Samuel Richardson was unable to construct an archetype of maternity in his 1742 sequel to Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740).  I expected to observe a continuation of exemplary female behaviour, transferring the faultlessness of her chastity to her mothering, in the sequel to his popular novel.  Instead, Pamela’s behaviour is conflicted and the guidance that readers could gain from her is consequently also uncertain.  The work’s critical failure seems to be located in this flawed non-representation of what constitutes exemplary maternity as it fails as a novel of conduct and instruction.  Richardson encounters what I term a ‘maternal contradiction’ in trying to present the otherwise exemplary Pamela attempting to perform the conflicting duties of wife and mother simultaneously.  His imperfect solution was to construct her as a woman who ‘writes’ rather than performs her paradigmatic maternity, a notion which forms the central theme of this book.

2) How did discourses of written maternal authority develop as the eighteenth century progressed?

The book maps the development of written maternal authority from the problematic inception as an imperfect response to barriers against physical mothering to implicit feminine authority in the covert didacticism of a woman writer.  Richardson’s Pamela wrote her mothering because of the conflicting demands on her body made by her husband and child.  At the end of the century Wollstonecraft also explored the necessity of writing as a maternal duty when the physical duties are denied in her unfinished novel Maria.  The book demonstrates the complete separation of the written construct of maternity from physical mothering by the end of the eighteenth century.  Ann Martin Taylor’s writing could be described as theoretical maternity as she ‘mothers’ the reader through her authorial voice and essentially is the mother become text when she draws the daughter/reader’s attention to the materiality of the book written by her physical hand.  The final writer examined briefly in this study, Jane Austen, indicates the manner in which the feminine authority of educational discourse examined in the rest of the book, can be seen to have imbued the distinctly feminine didactic narrator’s voice with implicit authority.

3) How did you choose your major case studies (Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Martin Taylor and Jane Austen), and were there other figures or works which you considered but rejected?

There are many writers whose works I would have liked to explore in relation to the empowering nature of women’s written educative authority – Anna Letitia Barbauld, Barbara Hofland and Hannah More were all writers I considered – but the theory I put forward here of a distinct written discipline of maternal education that is intended to be an empowering rhetorical device for women writers is not limited to the writers I have examined in this project.  These texts were chosen to demonstrate the chronological development of the paradigm of the maternal educator from its problematic incarnation in the mid-eighteenth century to the understanding of ideal maternity as a written construct in the early nineteenth century, and to do so through examination of a variety of literary genres.  The construction of maternity in conduct literature and the novel differs for many of the writers, demonstrating the difficulty of absorbing the paradigm of authoritative maternity into the familial plot, Mary Wollstonecraft’s encounters with the contradictions of the empowering aspects of maternity and the limitations placed on women by gendered social roles are still being played out today.  Maria Edgeworth’s influence in this area was established by the ground-breaking work of Mitzi Myers in the 1980s and 90s, which made her presence indispensable, although I did not have space to include a discussion of her bildungsromans Belinda and Ormond as I had intended.  Ann Martin Taylor is not really read today, but her works, particularly Maternal Solicitude (1814), have been represented by Davidoff and Hall (1987) as typical of the sort of moral ‘maternal advice’ that had become popular by the end of the eighteenth century.  In addition, the way in which her authorial authority was channelled through her Dissenting faith, and the role of women in the Congregationalist Church, made her work an interesting case study.  Jane Austen’s authoritative narrative voice in her didactic novels illustrates the empowering alternative to the negative characterisation of female education within a heterosexual courtship that is made available by implicit didactic female authority.

4) How effective was the discourse of maternal educational authority as a tool for allowing women effectively to intervene in political and philosophical debates?

While discussions about education allowed women to intervene in politically-infused debates regarding cognitive development and epistemology, particularly around the French Revolution of 1789, it was usually covertly achieved.  For example, I suggest that Maria Edgeworth employs a Burkean lexis in her discussion of natural ability in children, in order to signal her concerns regarding broader cultural epistemological breaks.  In spite of the acknowledged empowering effects of female control of educational writing, the authority gained by individual women through a maternal role is limited to the literary realm.  Mothering is a social function and therefore a self-negating process, defined in terms of what mothers can do for other actors in society.  A ‘good’ mother could create both great future statesmen and ideal future mothers, but she will not receive public acknowledgement of the performance of her role, even if her publicly admired son is the product of her excellent parenting.  Motherhood also becomes homogenised in its paradigmatic form, and therefore does not imbue individual women with unquestionable authority.  On the contrary, individual mothers are the subject of critical public expectations and appraisals in relation to their performance of this duty.  Whereas female authority in public discourse is heightened through symbolic maternity, individual mothers are increasingly examined and constrained in their conduct by the imposition of yet more restrictive written rules that can be applied to female behaviour.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I am currently looking at representations of ‘genius’ in educational writing of the long eighteenth century.  This project aims to explore how those writing about education negotiated a conception of genius, both natural and learned, in relation to cognitive development in children and working-class adults.

The objectives of the project are threefold: to re-assess the development of a modern concept of genius in the light of neglected eighteenth-century educational writing by women; to overturn the truism that eighteenth-century epistemology acknowledged genius only as it related to masculine creative originality; and to expand our cultural understanding of how childhood was constructed in this period.  The study will reassess the gendered nature of the debate surrounding the nature of genius, which is traditionally associated with the Romantic poets’ concern with masculine imagination.

Carol Baraniuk is currently a full-time Research Associate on the Ulster-Scots Education Project at the University of Ulster, where she has also lectured on the Ulster-Scots literary tradition.  She completed her doctorate on Ulster poetry in the Scottish tradition at the University of Glasgow, where she is an honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies.  Her new book, James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical, which we discuss below, was published earlier this month by Pickering & Chatto and draws on her thesis and on her extensive previous research on Ulster-Scots literature.

1) How did you first encounter James Orr, and how did you come to realise that you wanted to write a book about him?

I first read the poetry of James Orr (1770-1816) when I was appointed to a research position at Stranmillis University College, Belfast.  I was working on a project investigating Irish and Scottish connections in literature, language and history.  Orr was one of a group of poets who lived in Ulster, were descended from Scots migrants and whose language was Scots.  They were contemporaries of Robert Burns, and like him, employed vernacular Scots and the stanza forms associated with the Scottish poetic tradition in their work.  I realised very quickly that Orr’s work was exceptional in quality and, more than that, he was a genuine cultural transformer, whose poetry embedded the Scottish poetic tradition within Irish literature.  I felt that his genius and originality merited a book length discussion.

2) Your title describes Orr as ‘Poet and Irish Radical’. How closely were Orr’s Irishness and his radicalism bound up with his poetical activities?

Orr’s heritage was Scots, but he always regarded himself as an Irishman – his community had been settled in Ireland for almost two hundred years by the time of his birth in 1770.  He identified with Irish concerns: as Presbyterians his people had suffered marginalisation during the period of the Irish Penal Laws, and were still subject to the tithe, a tax paid to the Anglican church, throughout his lifetime.  His work shows that he had a burning desire for social justice.  He himself worked as a handloom weaver, but he was deeply moved by the plight of the poorest classes.  He also deplored inequality and supported Irish Catholics who wanted emancipation.  Orr was attracted by the aims of the Society of United Irishmen, who were influenced by the radicalism of Tom Paine, as expressed in The Rights of Man, and who sought a more independent, democratic Ireland – an Ireland for Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter.  He became closely linked to Henry Joy McCracken and James Hope, leaders of the United Irishmen in the north of Ireland, and he led a troop of men from his home village of Ballycarry, Co Antrim in support of McCracken’s attack on Antrim town on 7 June, 1798.  Some of his best poetry deals with his experiences as an activist, covering his involvement in the United Irish Rebellion, his time on the run, his brief exile to the United States, and how he came to terms with Ireland in the era of the Act of Union of 1801.

3) In your introduction, you argue that Orr ‘is too often evaluated in relation to Robert Burns’. In what ways do you see the case of Burns as being an unhelpful lens for considering Orr’s life, works and reception?

There’s no doubt that Orr greatly admired Burns, but he and other original and innovative Ulster Scots writers have been assumed to be Burns imitators, when the best of them are nothing of the kind.  There’s a great difference between writing within a tradition, and writing to copy or imitate.  Orr employs the language and stanza forms of the Scottish tradition with great sophistication and dynamism.  He was fully conversant with Burns’s work, but also with the works of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, whose work influenced Burns himself.  We don’t, however, refer to Burns as a Fergusson imitator!  Orr does dialogue with Burns, and challenge him in several works, most notably ‘The Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial’ which presents a much more bleak picture of rural labouring class life than Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, with which it is often compared.  It’s helpful to be aware of the Burns poem, but Orr moves the tradition forward significantly, dealing with community life and focusing on the condition of the poor in Ireland.  He’s also much less sentimental, more pessimistic than Burns.  There’s a far greater sense of alienation in his work that makes it compelling in its own right.

4) Which particular works by Orr would you recommend to readers who haven’t encountered him before, and which would you select for introducing him to undergraduate and postgraduate students?

‘The Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial’ is a must, also Orr’s series on the 1798 Rebellion and the Union.  These are masterpieces of Scots verse which engage with an iconic period in Irish history, while conveying a unique, northern Dissenter perspective on events.  However, Orr’s writing in standard English has been unfairly neglected, too often assumed to be uniformly awkward and stiff.  I’d want to make both undergraduates and post graduates aware that he produced many fine pieces in the standard register.  ‘The Assizes’, an exploration of the contemporary legal system, is a remarkable narrative poem in heroic couplets, which demonstrates his excellence as a poetic craftsman.  It really deserves to be anthologised alongside the works of Pope, Crabbe and others.  Orr produced two volumes of verse, one in 1804 and a second, posthumous volume in 1817, so he was a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Several texts demonstrate that he was aware of the development of Romanticism, and was actively engaging with it – wrestling with the concept of himself as a poet and creative artist, dealing with Romantic themes and adopting a Wordsworthian approach to his subjects.  He should be approached and investigated as an important Irish Romantic poet.

5) What new topics are you currently researching?

Currently I’m continuing to scrutinise Ulster-Scotland connections, from the Union of 1801 to Partition in 1921.  My particular focus is on literary developments which reflect the changing political climate within the British archipelago.  I’m also fascinated by the concept of renaissance in Scottish and Ulster-Scots literature and am beginning to explore how it recurs and changes in both Scotland and Ireland from the period of the Scottish vernacular revival of the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century Ulster-Scots revival.  I don’t regard Ulster-Scots writing as something isolated from major literary and historical developments – it should be understood as a northern branch of Irish literature, and investigated within the context of archipelagic literary, political and historical relationships as these have developed over the past four hundred years.