Online Talk: HomeMade Histories: Jane Austen & Fanny Knight

Dr Sophie Coulombeau is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of York. Her recent publications include Reading With The Burneys: Patronage, Paratext, and Performance (CUP, 2024) and Mary Hamilton and her Networks: Gender, Sociability, Manuscript, c.1740–1850, and she is General Editor of the Burney Journal. She is interested in the relationship between naming and identity during the long eighteenth century, and also in the relationship between the development of the eighteenth-century novel and different forms of print and manuscript information management. For a long time now – sixteen years, give or take – she has been working on a book project addressing those topics, which is called The Point of the Name: Onomastics, Identity, and the Novel, 1759-1817. Her paper today is drawn from the last chapter of that book, and a version of her findings was published in Persuasions in 2025.