Motherhood, Children and Loss in the Works of Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley, 1820-44

This project will break new ground by exploring themes of motherhood and loss in a group of hitherto relatively unexplored writings by both women, including: Coleridge's 'Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children'(1834), and 'On Nervousness' (c. 1834), and Shelley's 'Proserpine' (1820), 'Maurice' (1820), and 'Rambles in Germany and Italy' (1844). By so doing the project will contribute to understanding of three areas identified by scholars as crucial to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Romantic period culture: women's writing; literature for and about children; and 'late Romanticism' (i.e., British literary culture of the 1820s-1840s).
The project's main aims are:
To develop a new analysis of Sara Coleridge's and Mary Shelley's writing for/about children in the context of Romantic ideas of childhood
To investigate how the experience of motherhood and maternal loss can be shown to have inflected Coleridge's and Shelley's works
To analyse the rapidly emergent genre of children's literature in the Romantic period, considering how Coleridge's and Shelley's critical reputations have been shaped by their perception as women writers for children