TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews)

Recorded February 27, 2023. An 'in conversation' event featuring Visiting Research Fellow Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews) in conversation with Prof Aileen Douglas (Professor of English, TCD) and organized by Trinity Long Room Hub. Susan Manly is a Reader in English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her research interests are in Romantic-period Irish and English literature. She is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), the best-selling Irish contemporary of Jane Austen, and has produced scholarly editions of a wide range of Edgeworth's writings. 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 milieux, correspondences, 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. In 2019, Susan made a radio documentary about Edgeworth, ‘A Radical Life’ which aired on RTÉ Lyric FM in May 2019 and re-aired in May 2020. You can hear it here. As part of Susan’s research for her new political biography of Maria Edgeworth, she has been looking at Edgeworth’s attitude towards West Indian and especially Jamaican slavery in the early nineteenth century. Edgeworth’s fictions and plays often figured emancipated African and Creole characters: for instance, her celebrated novel, Belinda (1801) – originally entitled Abroad and At Home – features two such characters. The extent and nature of Edgeworth’s personal knowledge of and implication with the West Indies, however, has never been fully established before. Educated in Ireland and America, Aileen Douglas holds a PhD from Princeton University. She began her academic career in the States, teaching at Washington University in St. Louis for five years before returning to Trinity to take up a position in the School of English. Her research interests focus on the writing of the long eighteenth century. In her monographs, 'Work in Hand: Print, Script, and Writing, 1690-1820' (OUP 2017) and 'Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body' (Chicago 1996) she explores aspects of embodiment, materiality, and literary representation. She also has a particular interest in Irish writing and writing by women. Aileen Douglas is a General Editor of the IRC-supported Early Irish Fiction 1690-1820 series (Four Courts, 2011-) and has co-edited two volumes for the series. Her co-edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield for the Cambridge Collected Works of Goldsmith is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2024. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/