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We are delighted to announce this year’s six Visiting Fellows, who will join us over two 4-week cohorts in August and November.
This year, we have awarded one British Association of Romantic Studies Fellowship, with the generous support of BARS, as well as five Chawton House Fellowships. These Fellowships have been made possible by the continued support of the Ardeola Charitable Trust.
Summer Cohort
Bethan Elliott (University of York)
My project centres on a discussion of Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey alongside the play Orra by Scottish author Joanna Baillie. Particularly, I will focus on the ways these texts engage closely with Gothic conventions to comment on gender, fear, and the relationship between the two. While written in different mediums and leading their heroines to very different fates, both Austen and Baillie’s approaches engage with the conventions of the genre to enable parody while also serving as a medium for more genuine concerns about the degree of patriarchal control extended over the lives and fortunes of their central characters. The Gothic, for both of these texts, serves a specific function as not only a fantastical distraction for young women, but as an indirect didactic medium in which they can see examples of patriarchal norms taken to exaggerated extremes. Using Chawton House’s collection, I will investigate how authors like Baillie and Austen produced Gothic works that engaged with ideas around fear, the enjoyment of it, and its didactic potential.
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Rebecca Hamilton (University of Aberdeen)
During my time at Chawton House, I will build on a chapter of my doctoral research, where I examined how Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) parodies the formal and structural approaches of popular conduct literature to critique the virtue of feminine silence that traps women in abusive marriages. Brontë’s novel bears a striking resemblance to Eliza Haywood’s earlier (1751) novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless in terms of epistolary novelistic structure, an abusive marriage plot, and its drawing on conduct advice. I will consider whether Haywood similarly parodies conduct literature as a method of unsilencing marital abuse, paying particular attention to the role that Haywood’s epistolary structural apparatus plays in this. I will examine Chawton’s holdings of seventeenth and eighteenth-century conduct literature holdings, as well as the Eliza Haywood collection and Tony Yablon collection of Brontë ephemera. I plan to turn my research into an article for publication..
Ellis Naylor (Bath Spa University)
During the residency at Chawton House, I will focus on two chapters in my thesis which overall aims to explore the life and political activity of Lady Louisa Knightley (1842-1913), an elite Anglican women’s rights activist whose political activity spanned the latter half of the nineteenth-century. I will redraft and add to the first chapter, which is a discussion of key sources and argues that women’s life writing in the early nineteenth-century is a neglected and extremely valuable source. This in turn will direct the argument of the whole thesis, which is that Lady Knightley’s own life writing empowered her politically..
Winter Cohort
Emma Butler (Edge Hill University), BARS Fellow
During my time at Chawton House, I will be consulting the library for a chapter of my PhD thesis about sexual and social precarity at the seaside. My thesis ‘From Health to Leisure: The Seaside Resort in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’ examines how the seaside is represented as a liminal space related to both health and leisure within nineteenth-century literature. The ‘Gothic’ chapter that I will be working on includes Jane Austen’s depiction of sexual precarity at the seaside – Mr Wickham in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for example – so the connection between Chawton and Austen is very fitting. I am particularly excited to read less-studied literary texts from the nineteenth century that depict the seaside, especially Brighton, and literary criticism to tie together my interest in the Gothic, sexual and social liminality, and the coast for my thesis. Having the opportunity to also consult Anna Austen Lefroy’s continuation of Sanditon which is held at Chawton House will be particularly significant to my PhD chapters on health and class/economics, as well as helping to develop my study of Austen’s unfinished novel in my thesis.
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Amy Wilcockson (University of Glasgow)
‘Fame, Fans, and Funds: The Romantic Period Subscription List’..
Amory Zhao (Trinity College Cambridge)
My time at Chawton House will be dedicated to its substantial collection of Minerva Press novels, contributing to my research on female literary production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My PhD project—titled ‘Affect and the Machine: Manufacturing the Female Author, 1750-1850’—interrogates questions about originality, authorship, and mass culture against England’s growing anxieties surrounding machines and technologies of commodity production. The development of the novel, as a literary form capable of psychological embodiment and an emergent object of mass production, must grapple with the conflict between the self and the machine—a negotiation intensified by the participation of female novelists in the marketplace. Minerva Press authors, notorious for their prolific output, were frequently likened to the cogs and wheels of a literary machine. However, a closer examination of these novels’ typography and inconsistencies may reveal further evidence of editorial control and production challenges faced by Minerva Press authors in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. By interrogating the publishing practices of popular novels, my research contributes to historical and ongoing conversations about the visibility of literary labour and the value of cultural production to reveal the affective and humanistic potential inherent in acts of writing.