{"id":98,"date":"2013-11-18T18:40:45","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T18:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=98"},"modified":"2013-11-18T18:40:45","modified_gmt":"2013-11-18T18:40:45","slug":"five-questions-jane-darcy-on-melancholy-and-literary-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=98","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Jane Darcy on Melancholy and Literary Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jane<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr Jane Darcy is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of English at University College London<\/a>, where she was previously a British Academy postdoctoral fellow.\u00a0 Prior to that, she completed her doctorate at King’s College London.\u00a0 Below, we discuss her first monograph, Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816<\/a>, which developed in unexpected directions from her thesis and which was published by Palgrave earlier this year.<\/p>\n

1) You write in your introduction that your initial interest was in aesthetic representations of melancholy. How did your project evolve towards focusing specifically on biographies?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like most people, I imagine, I\u2019m drawn to what is minor key and elegiac in art and literature.\u00a0 And I\u2019m always fascinated by details of the lives of writers, so many of whom seem to have suffered profoundly.\u00a0 In my thesis I looked at a range of writers from Dr Johnson to Thomas Carlyle and tried to trace evolving medical ideas of melancholy (or hypochondria, as it was often termed) by looking at what their first biographers made of the condition.<\/p>\n

2) The book’s two sections focus on periods of distinctly different lengths, the first examining the years 1640-1791 and the second the years around 1800. How did this particular division emerge during the course of your research?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turning the thesis into a book was a longer and more complex business than I\u2019d imagined (it took a total of four years).\u00a0 I found myself thinking more about literary biography and asking myself different questions.\u00a0 When did it emerge as a distinct genre?\u00a0 And which writers particularly shaped the practice?\u00a0 I realised I needed to go back to the seventeenth century for this, and this in turn necessitated a radical restructure.\u00a0 The first half of the book then took the idea of which biographies Johnson would have known when he complained of the paucity of well-written literary lives.\u00a0 Most books about biography tend to jump from Boswell to Elizabeth Gaskell, so I decided to make the focus of the second half four biographies written around 1800 (i.e. before a consensus developed about the familiar Victorian life-and-letters model).\u00a0 My PhD chapters on Coleridge and Carlyle didn\u2019t make the cut, but I added in Wollstonecraft, which proved really interesting.<\/p>\n

3) To what extent were the biographers you examine drawing on generic understandings of melancholy, and to what extent were they remaking it through the prisms of their particular subjects?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of my biographers were self-confessed melancholics and so had both intellectual and personal reasons for exploring this strain in their subjects.\u00a0 The only one who wasn\u2019t seemed to be William Godwin.\u00a0 I checked this with one of the great Godwin experts, Pamela Clemit<\/a>, and she agreed he was just was unusual in not appeared to suffer too much.\u00a0 I was curious, too, to see that Wollstonecraft herself uses the term \u2018melancholy\u2019 many times in her Letters from a Short Residence<\/em>, but in her personal letters, which are steeped in misery, she rarely used it.<\/p>\n

4) Are there particular works from among the biographies you’ve examined that you think deserve to be more widely read or which you think could be usefully added to undergraduate or postgraduate syllabi?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The truth is, not really.\u00a0 Godwin\u2019s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft<\/em> has joined the canon alongside Boswell\u2019s Life of Johnson<\/em>, but Hayley\u2019s Cowper<\/em> and Currie\u2019s Burns<\/em> are more interesting for the debates they sparked off than for their own sakes.<\/p>\n

5) What’s next for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a long time on melancholy, I\u2019ve turned my attention to comedy.\u00a0 I\u2019m co-editing a book of essays with Louise Lee<\/a> at Roehampton on Victorian comedy.\u00a0 I\u2019m also writing a non-academic book about the extraordinary popularity of the Isle of Wight with Romantic and Victorian writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Jane Darcy is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of English at University College London, where she was previously a British Academy postdoctoral fellow.\u00a0 Prior to that, she… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}