Revolution and romanticism, 1789-1834

69 p. ; 19 cm

"Helen Maria Williams was a poet, novelist, and radical thinker deeply immersed in the political struggles of the 1790s. Her Letters Written in France is the first and most important of eight volumes chronicling the French Revolution to an England fearful of another civil war. Her twenty-six letters recounting Old Regime tyranny and revolutionary events provide both an apology for the Revolution and a representation of it as a sublime spectacle."--BOOK JACKET.

L.E.L. - poet, novelist, playwright, reviewer - wrote busily and profitably, one of a generation of women writers active as the last phase of Romanticism ushered in the Victorian period. She wrote with enviable ease and professional polish, as the ballads and narrative poems in this volume amply demonstrate. In her thirties she made an unfortunate marriage, went to Africa with her husband, and mysteriously died there in the same year, whether by accident or suicide is not known. The improvisatrice was published in 1824 and went rapidly through several editions. This facsimile is based on the fifth of 1825.

In 1792, when she was 42, Joanna Southcott began writing down her prophecies, sealing them against the day they were to occur. In 1801 her publications began to appear, written in a combination of prose - sometimes plain, sometimes incantatory - and primitive verse. This pamphlet of 1802 is a sample of the flood of writings which she poured forth until her death in 1814. Joanna is visited by Satan, or Apollyon, or a Friend of Satan, and disputes with him; she triumphs; she recounts her dreams of a flying horseman, a balloon, fires in the sky. A farmer's daughter and one-time servant, she is a descendant of Bunyan in the period of Blake. Unlike Blake she reaches a wide audience, speaking most directly to the poor and to women. Visionary, deluded, or mad, she was the object of veneration and focus of a large and devoted cult.

"'I have met today the personification of my Corsair,' Byron wrote to Teresa Guiccioli in January 1822. 'He sleeps with the poem under his pillow, and all his past adventures and present manners aim at this personification.' Trelawny was undoubtedly a traveller, an adventurer, a teller of tall tales, and he amused Byron. Though too much of a fantasist to be a wholly reliable witness, he gives us an immensely attractive account of Byron (critical) and Shelley (friendly) in the period 1822-4. He uttered pagan incantations over the burning body of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio and saved his heart from the fire. Later he accompanied Byron to Greece."--BOOK JACKET.

War rages and a tyrant rules in Klosterheim but a stranger appears with the power to shake the hearts of evil and innocence alike. Does he bring doom, or deliverance?

Original book at the University of Oxford

This important collection includes about eight previously unpublished poems and a much enlarged version of "Destiny of Nations;" together with a poem by the American, Washington Allston. Each signed gathering is registered "Vol. II"; it had been intended that Sibylline leaves would form part of a uniform four-volume set of Coleridge's works with Biographia literaria and other works, but this never materialised. cf. Hanesy, J.L. Bibl. of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1903, p. 10. Includes 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' under Coleridge's name for the first time. -- abebooks website.

"Written halfway between Confessions of an English opium-eater (1822) and the great, but fragmentary, Suspiria de profundis of the 1840s, Klosterheim is ostensibly a gothic fantasy in the manner of Ann Radcliffe, set in Germany during the Thirty Years' War. But De Quincey's gothic has a particular function, unlocking a door into the opium-taker's world of illusion and dream. He is writing at a period of desperate need and continuing addiction, and writing very well. Coleridge claimed to have read nothing since Quentin Durward that 'would compare in interest with Klosterheim', adding that De Quincey achieves a 'purity of style and idiom' to which Scott does not aspire."--BOOK JACKET.

"Caroline Norton - granddaughter of R. B. Sheridan, editor, contributor to literary annuals, friend of Lord Melbourne - was one of the most successful literary women of her day, a poet whose work has been strangely neglected. An unhappy marriage led to separation from her children, her anguish flowing into this anonymously-published testament to the abuse of child-labour. Poised between Wordsworth's appalled portrayal in the Excursion of the factory child, lungs filled with cotton fibres, and the more famous protests of the Victorian novel, the poem has brevity, political relevance, and force."--BOOK JACKET.