Romanticism and the Letter

Madeleine Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Liverpool University Press published her first monograph, Shelley’s Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2017, and her book, The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley (2019) is published by Anthem Press.Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature at Birmingham City University. His publications include Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013), edited with Michael O’Neill. He is currently writing a monograph about literary letter writing in the British Romantic period.

“This volume actually has a great deal to offer students and academics … . Each chapter makes a welcome contribution to the growing interest in Romantic period correspondence in various forms. … After reading the range of new perspectives and innovative scholarship in Romanticism and the Letter, it is abundantly clear that this is an exciting time to be ‘rethink[ing] the value of letters’ in Romantic studies.” (Crystal Biggin, The Charles and Mary Lamb Journal, Issue 1, Summer, 2024)“If the letters of Romantic period authors have for the most part been viewed as a supplement to the creative work, valuable for substance to the exclusion of literary qualities, Romanticism and the Letter does much to challenge this misconception while opening the way to further critical work on the epistolary culture and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century.” (Mary A. Waters, Biography, Vol. 45 (1), 2022)“This volume is a timely contribution to larger trends in literary and media studies. … Romanticism and the Letter shows how important letter writing and epistolarity were to key Romantic authors, and opens a field for further explorations of Romantic epistolary culture.” (Rachael Scarborough King, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34 (3), 2022)

• 1.Introduction.- 2.Mary O’Connell, Romantic Letter Writing and the Publisher.- 3. Stephen Behrendt, The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon.- 4.Oliver Clarkson, The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters.- 5.Susan J. Wolfson, Two Wordsworths: Mountain-climbing, Letter-writing.- 6. Gregory Leadbetter, ‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters.- 7.Lynda Pratt, The ‘entire man of letters’?: Robert Southey, Correspondence, and Romantic Incompleteness.- 8. Timothy Webb, Charles Lamb and the Rattle of Existence.- 9. Joe Bray, The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style.- 10. Daniel Westwood, ‘Transported to your presence’: Leigh Hunt’s Letters to the Shelleys.- 11. Jane Stabler, ‘Foam is their foundation’: The Poetics of Byron’s letters.- 12.Madeleine Callaghan, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters.- 13. Michael O’Neill, ‘The Varied Pauses of His Style’: Shelley’s Letters from Italy.- 14.Andrew Bennett, John Keats’s Epistolary Intimacy.- 15. Anthony Howe, ‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter, and the Poem.- 16. Angela Wright, ‘The house of misery’: Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.