Mary Wollstonecraft

Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Edited by Ingrid Horrocks, Broadview Press, 2013

“The art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in one of her many reviews of works of travel writing. A Short Residence is her own travel memoir. In a series of letters addressed to an unnamed lover, the work narrates Wollstonecraft’s journey through Scandinavia in 1795, on much of which she was accompanied by her infant daughter. Passionate and personal, A Short Residence is at once a moving epistolary travel narrative, a politically-motivated ethnographic tract, a work of scenic tourism, and a sentimental journey. It is both as much a work of political thought as Wollstonecraft’s better known treatises, and a brilliant, innovative, and influential work in the genre.

Endorsements and Reviews

‘Horrocks’ edition does justice to the magnificence and complexity of these Letters. The appendices alone provide material for an entire course in contemporary travel-writing, linking it to literary, philosophical, sentimental, and feminist concerns. An unparalleled achievement for Wollstonecraft scholarship and Romantic Studies.’ — Mary Favret, Johns Hopkins University

‘Ingrid Horrocks’ broad-ranging introduction and selection of appendices function as a highly useful interpretive guidebook to the travel writings that they accompany. The judicious survey of texts concerning the revolutionary debate, late-eighteenth-century travel narratives, sentimental journeying, and biographical documents related to Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian travels enable readers clearly to envision just how widely, and into what still-unsettled territories, Wollstonecraft’s travel writing extends.’ — Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Media

Ingrid talks about Mary Wollstonecraft with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand.

Charlotte Smith

Major Poetic Works

Edited by Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks, Broadview Press, 2017.

Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith’s major poetic works are foundational texts of the Romantic period. Smith’s innovations in poetic form have also placed her at the forefront of twenty-first-century scholarship on the period. This edition presents her three major poetic works—Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800), The Emigrants (1793), and Beachy Head (1807). While the significance of these three volumes of poetry was recognized in their own time, this edition suggests that they remain major texts for thinking through such questions as the relationship between public and private; the ethical treatment of refugees and other persecuted people; the position of women in a patriarchal society; and the usefulness of science as a way of making sense of a complex and ever-changing world.

Endorsements and Reviews

“This welcome edition of Smith’s poetry renders her verse readily comprehensible to those new to it while simultaneously fostering ongoing scholarship… A scrupulous editorial framework... This edition will contribute to flourishing attention to Smith’s poetry among those pursuing feminist, historicist, ecocritical, and formalist approaches to the period.” —Sarah Zimmerman, Fordham University

“In their introduction to this invaluable edition, Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks make a strong case for the vital importance of Charlotte Smith’s poetry to both the literary and the socio-political history of the Romantic era. They also show her to be a cosmopolitan poet whose internationalist perspectives and sympathies resonate today.” —Kari Lokke, University of California, Davis

“Together Claire Knowles and Ingrid Horrocks are ideal editors for a new, much-needed, paperback edition of Charlotte Smith’s major poetic works … expertly edited...” — Elizabeth A. Dolan, European Romantic Review