''The Regions of Poetic Thought': A critical edition of the Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge'

Between 1830 and 1850 women readers and writers made up the larger part of the literary world, and a woman literary critic, selecting and shaping the literary audience, was an important voice. ''The Regions of Poetic Thought': Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge' enables us to hear one such voice.

She emerges as a critic of rare intelligence and theoretical reach as well as a lively commentator on her own times. Her critical contributions range widely. First, she was the polemical and scholarly re-presenter of her father Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a series of seminal new editions. This pioneering work has been highly praised by later editors and commentators, but has been very difficult to access: the present book represents her most important contributions to 'Aids to Reflection' (1843), 'Biographia Literaria' (1847) and 'Essays on His Own Times' (1850). Secondly, she was an exceptional critic of Wordsworth - both admiring and sceptical - over almost 30 years. Alongside her father, Wordsworth was the great formative figure in her creative life, and the foremost influence (ahead even of STC) on her own poetry. Thirdly, her letters are the best guide to her own increasingly admired poetry and prose fiction. In them she defends her children's verses and 'Phantasmion' against readers who thought they lacked moral design: 'the author's chief end and aim consists in cultivating the imagination by exhibiting the general and abstract beauty of things', she contended -- but even so 'there are plenty of morals in the several parts'. And fourthly, she was a diversely brilliant critic and essayist on literatures ancient and modern, from Homer and Pindar to Tennyson and Charlotte Brontë. In particular, her often hostile remarks on contemporary women writers give us a contemporary's assessment of Victorian writers now being reread and reconsidered, and also a perspective on the mixture of audacity and self-deprecation in her own literary entry into the public sphere.

Her energy and intellectual capacity were extraordinary, and warmly admired by the small but culturally crucial audience her editions reached. Even De Quincey, whom she sought to confute in the 1847 'Biographia', regarded 'her mode of argument as unassailable' . Her brother Hartley praised her 'Essay on Rationalism' (included in 'Aids to Reflection') as 'a wonder. I say not a wonder of a woman's work - where lives the man that could have written it? None in Great Britain since our Father died.' A century later Edmund Blunden 'doubted whether any finer philosopher (or reasoner) can be found among Englishwomen'. She deserves to be seen, without these gender caveats, alongside Mill and Newman as one of the most powerful philosophical thinkers of the early Victorian period.

Much of the material here is printed from manuscript. Sara Coleridge was a natural writer. She had the Victorian epistolary habit, and well over 2,000 letters survive. She was also a prolific essayist, sometimes in her correspondence, sometimes in manuscript essays which although carefully finished seem not to have been shown widely. She had stamina, and the mass of her writing suggests her appetite to be heard and her consciousness that she had timely and cogent opinions. This volume selects from her finished essays and from private letters in which she expressed herself more sharply and freely than she allowed herself when imagining the public ear.

Almost none of Sara Coleridge's literary criticism can currently be read except in Victorian editions, and much of it has never been published. Following on from her 'Collected Poems' (2007), which with the aid of the AHRC I brought out in 2007, ''The Regions of Poetic Thought: Selected Literary Criticism of Sara Coleridge' gives us the material for a reassessment of an important undervalued Victorian writer.