Dr Susan Manly

Director of Teaching

Reader

Researcher profile

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2640

Email

sm32@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

Room 40

Location

Castle House

 

Biography

Susan Manly is a Reader in English. After her M.A. at Cambridge, she completed her British Academy-funded D.Phil. in Oxford in 1995. She joined the School of English at St Andrews in 1998.

Susan's research interests are in Romantic-period Irish and English literature, and in particular in writing published in the 1790s. She is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), a best-selling Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, and has produced scholarly editions of a wide range of Edgeworth's writings, including her innovative books for children and young adults. She is currently completing a political biography of Edgeworth. This will be the first account of Edgeworth's life to appear in the last 45 years. It will provide a new assessment of Edgeworth's intellectual and political life, looking at her milieu, correspondence, allegiances, interventions, and influence. Edgeworth's sustained engagements with debates about Ireland, about slavery and about women will form a major part of the story told in this biography.

Other research interests include Romantic-period writing for and about children, focusing especially on the work of radicals and reformists, such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Aikin, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Susan has published a number of essays and articles in this field. Her next monograph after the Edgeworth biography will draw on this research and is provisionally entitled Schools for Treason: Radical and Reformist Writing for Children, 1780-1825.

Susan welcomes applications from students interested in pursuing doctoral research in any of these areas.

Research areas

Literature of the 1790s, including Burke, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; the novels and educational writing of Maria Edgeworth; Romantic-era children's literature by radical writers, including Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Aikin, and Godwin; Romantic-era gender politics in Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Austen.

Selected publications

• Introduction: worlds of Maria Edgeworth

  Manly, S. C. & Wharton, J., 15 Dec 2020, In: European Romantic Review. 31, 6, p. 655-662

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Open access

  Maria Edgeworth's child heroes, Irish education and 'the spirit of revenge'

  Manly, S. C., 1 Mar 2020, In: Eighteenth-Century Ireland. 34, p. 28-49

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Maria Edgeworth's political lives

  Manly, S., 15 Dec 2020, In: European Romantic Review. 31, 6, p. 767-786

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• ‘Maria Edgeworth as Political Thinker: Government, Rebellion, Rewards and Punishment’

  Manly, S. C., 18 Dec 2019, “Still Blundering Into Sense”: Maria Edgeworth, her context, her legacy . Leproni, R. & Fantaccini, F. (eds.). Firenze: Firenze University Press, p. 47-59 13 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• 'Powers expanding slow': children's 'unfolding' minds in radical writing of the 1790s

  Manly, S. C., Oct 2018, Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. O'Malley, A. (ed.). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 139-162 23 p. (Literary Cultures and Childhoods).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Open access

  Literature for children

  Manly, S., 3 Oct 2018, The Oxford handbook of British Romanticism. Duff, D. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth's "The Good Aunt" and "The Grateful Negro"

  Manly, S. C., 2013, In: Essays in Romanticism. 20, p. 19-36 18 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Selected Tales for Children and Young People: Maria Edgeworth

  Manly, S. C. (Editor), 2013, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave. 205 p.

  Research output: Book/Report › Scholarly edition

• "Take a 'poon, pig": Property, Class and Common Culture in Maria Edgeworth's "Simple Susan"

  Manly, S. C., 2012, In: Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 37, 3, p. 306-322 17 p.

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• William Godwin's 'school of morality'

  Manly, S. C., 2012, In: The Wordsworth Circle. 43, 3, p. 135-142

  Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

 

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