Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire invo... more Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire invokes, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has received barely any notice, although it is the one vampire text Rice specifically cites. This essay argues that the Rime provides a major structural and thematic template for the novel in pointing towards what Louis accomplishes in telling his life story to the interviewer: creating a vampire aesthetic that enables him to survive the ennui of immortality and work through his conflicted sense of himself. The pleasure he takes in telling the story of his life provides an alternate version of what he terms the ultimate experience of the vampiric kill: the re-enactment of one’s human death and vampiric rebirth. Through autobiography he actualizes what Rice brilliantly postulates as the component of vampiric existence that enables the most successful vampires to thrive: he locates an art form that suits and enhances his idiosyncratic nature. Whereas Coleridge’s mariner remains locked in a cycle of traumatic repetition, Rice recasts the mariner’s dilemma as a potential solution for Louis’s moral and existential crisis in offering an aesthetic that empowers him to perform his identity as a vampire on his own terms.
Female Voices: Forms of Women's Reading, Self-Education and Writing in Britain (1770-1830), ed. Eva Antal and Antonella Braida, 2022
This essay offers an overview of Mary Tighe’s lifelong commitment to scholarship and self-educati... more This essay offers an overview of Mary Tighe’s lifelong commitment to scholarship and self-education, values fostered by her mother, Methodist leader Theodosia Blachford, advocated in Psyche, discussed in Selena, documented in Verses, and sustained in her final work, a 181-page untitled journal that comments on nearly all the books she read between April 1806 and June 1809, comprising 228 entries on 246 literary, historical, religious, philosophical, political, and scientific texts written in English, French, Italian, and German. Tighe borrowed at least half of these texts from the Irish antiquarian and Italianist Joseph Cooper Walker, with whom she maintained a bookish correspondence between 1802 and 1809. Her 58 letters to Walker in tandem with her journal provide a rich archive of the impressive reading and research schedule she pursued during her final years, as she struggled against the debilitating illness that took her life in March 1810.
Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asap... more Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asaph in Wales (1874–1877), where he not only completed the studies that resulted in his ordination but also began to write poetry again, after a silence that commenced in 1868, when he determined to dedicate himself to the priesthood. On the fourth day of his arrival at St Bueno's, he "passed Mrs. Hemans' house," an event he recorded in his journal and mentioned the next day in a letter to his mother: "I walked to St. Asaph and passed the place where Mrs. Hemans lived and wrote and saw her monument in the Cathedral." Although Felicia Hemans was born in Liverpool (1793) and died in Dublin (1835), she passed most of her life in Wales (1800–1828). Akin to Hopkins, who wrote to his mother, "I have always looked on myself as half Welsh" (Correspondence, 1: 237), Hemans identified herself as a "naturalised Welshwoman." While critics like Catherine Brennan and Elizabeth Edwards rightly interrogate the nature of Hemans's nationalist enthusiasm for Wales, equivocally expressed in her Selection of Welsh Melodies and numerous lyrics situated in or about Wales, Jane Aaron notes that her contemporary Welsh audience hailed her as a "poet for Wales." Hopkins may not have read her poetry there, but he certainly knew it: in addition to the familiarity most schoolchildren had with "Casabianca," his mother owned four volumes of her poetry, she influenced the style of his father's poetry, and Hopkins notably categorized her as a member of the sentimental school of poetry in an 1881 letter to Richard Watson Dixon (Correspondence, 1: 505–506).9 Hopkins rarely referred to any female authors in his letters or journals, much less female poets, beyond his well-documented admiration for Christina Rossetti and his often-disparaging attention to Katherine Tynan. Indeed his position on masculinist power and poetic ability—that "masterly execution . . . is a kind of male gift and especially marks off men from women"—made him an infamous target of feminist critique in the 1970s and 1980s. None of the extant Hopkins scholarship examines Hemans's poetry in relation to his, but, surprisingly, several of the eleven major poems Hopkins wrote at St. Bueno's invoke Hemans, beginning with the poem that broke his long silence, "The Wreck of the Deutschland."
SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2021
Anna Seward commended Mary Tighe’s 1795 sonnet for the Ladies of Llangollen shortly before she co... more Anna Seward commended Mary Tighe’s 1795 sonnet for the Ladies of Llangollen shortly before she composed her own poem for Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, “Llangollen Vale” (1796). When Tighe revised her “Addressed to the Ladies of Llangollen Vale” for her 1805 collection Verses, she positioned it within a sonnet sequence that critiques Seward’s poem and Seward’s sonnet theories. Tighe’s critique highlights the different aesthetic values she and Seward espoused as private and public poets.
<1>Shortly after Mary Tighe's death in March 1810 her survivors produced three distinct collectio... more <1>Shortly after Mary Tighe's death in March 1810 her survivors produced three distinct collections of her poetry, each one using a different print mode to present their competing visions of her identity, her poetics, and her significance to disparate readerships. The first was Psyche, with Other Poems, published by the Longman group in conventional print for the general public in May 1811. No editor's name appears in the edition, which led to its false attribution to Tighe's brother-in-law and fellow poet William Tighe for nearly 200 years, but in 2011 Averill Buchanan definitively identified Tighe's husband Henry Tighe as the editor, and posited that he received some assistance from Tighe's brother John Blachford.(1) The second collection, Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years, also lacks a named editor, but internal evidence indicates that Tighe's mother Theodosia Blachford prepared this limited edition for a carefully chosen group of friends in the autumn of 1811, using a local press to print the volume in a hybrid mode that interspersed poems in manuscript with poems in print. The third, Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe, contains handwritten transcriptions of 20 Tighe lyrics in an undated bound manuscript signed by E. I. Fox.(2) Ironically, though Fox is the only one of the three editors who self-identifies, Fox's identity and connection to Tighe is not yet known, but the selections suggest Fox participated in Tighe's coterie, sharing verse and friendship with other members of Tighe's social circle. Husband, mother, friend: each editor stands in a particular relationship with Tighe, and, as this essay will argue, each editor embodies and recreates that relationship in the print mode they employ, the arrangements they devise, and the poems they select to pay tribute to Tighe, to memorialize her, and, ultimately, to monumentalize her as a projection of themselves. Akin to the familial editors Margaret Ezell describes in a formative essay on the posthumous publication of women's manuscripts, whose paratexts often "stress the fidelity of the printed text to the departed author's living voice," Henry
This essay explores the ways in which Mary Tighe's manuscript novel Selena restages characters an... more This essay explores the ways in which Mary Tighe's manuscript novel Selena restages characters and situations from Charlotte Smith's novels Emmeline and Celestina to advance the courtship novel's potential for resisting patriarchal enculturation. The parallels between Selena and Emmeline are striking: both protagonists leave home at seventeen and are stalked by their cousins; both meet their true loves after they commit to relationships with their cousins; both have older unhappily married female friends whose experiences partially represent their authors' autobiographies; and both sustain significant friendships with fallen women they try to help. Many of these parallels resurface in Celestina, which presents a second stalker in Montague Thorold, who serves as a model for a second stalker in Selena, Edwin Stanmore. Comparable to the radical revision of Apuleius Tighe presents in Psyche, Selena transforms episodes from Smith's novels to push harder on their proto–feminist politics, scripting harsher outcomes for the stalkers who pursue Selena and strengthening her psychological and moral autonomy. More than a homage, but not quite a correction, Tighe's attention to Smith in Selena reinterprets the work of a valued predecessor, engaging in what Susan Wolfson designates as a romantic interaction.
Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things. Ed. Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett, 2020
This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who inte... more This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.
In July 1806 William Hayley suggested that Mary Tighe publish an illustrated edition of Psyche; o... more In July 1806 William Hayley suggested that Mary Tighe publish an illustrated edition of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, using engravings of George Romney’s Cupid and Psyche cartoons. Tighe declined, as she did all recommendations that she publish an edition of Psyche. Although she usually cited modesty as her rationale for not publishing, in this instance she pointed to the unsuitability of Romney’s illustrations for her narrative. The Romney cartoons closely adhered to Apuleius’s narrative of the Cupid and Psyche legend, and were sketched in 1777 to illustrate Hayley’s subsequently unfinished verse translation of Apuleius’s tale. This essay argues that Hayley tried to use Tighe’s Psyche to complete the unfinished project he wanted to pursue with Romney in the first days of their friendship, which would help him overcome the emotional paralysis he experienced in 1805-1806 as he struggled to move forward on his Life of Romney.
Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism. Ed. Andrew O. Winkles and Angela Rehbein, 2017
This essay looks at five Romantic-era women writers who invoke Mary Tighe in their works by name,... more This essay looks at five Romantic-era women writers who invoke Mary Tighe in their works by name, quotation, or epigraph--Anna Maria Porter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Alicia Lefanu, Lady Morgan, and Felicia Hemans--to consider what these invocations suggest about lines of affiliation, the construction of aesthetic communities, and attempts to shape or forecast reception. It argues that these woman writers create a citational network through the figure and work of Mary Tighe, to call attention to her significance and therein establish their own histories of influence and reception. Their citational practices produce a more expansive version of what Gerard Genette designates the ‘epigraph effect’ in Paratexts, affording opportunities for writers to signal their place in a cultural tradition, to acknowledge or choose their peers and predecessors, and to proleptically instantiate their consecration in a particular literary pantheon. They effectively create a canon of their own by building citational networks.
A Handbook of British Romanticism: Text and Theory. Ed. Ralf Haekel, 2017
Mary Tighe’s epic romance Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805) is a visionary poem in which Tigh... more Mary Tighe’s epic romance Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805) is a visionary poem in which Tighe shows that a woman poet can be inspired by the muse and employ the power of the gaze. Tighe re-imagines Apuleius’s story of Cupid and Psyche as a female-centered bildungsroman with a proto-feminist slant. The first two cantos of “Psyche” adapt many of the narrative events that shape the first two thirds of Apuleius=s tale, culminating with the dramatic moment of Psyche=s transgression, when she looks at Cupid and he leaves. Once Psyche begins her quest to win Cupid back, Tighe sets a new course. She takes Psyche through a dream-like allegorical landscape, where she faces morally ambiguous situations that reprise aspects of her transgression, testing her responses to what she sees, and what she acknowledges about what she sees. Psyche’s ability to solve these hermeneutic puzzles result in the restoration of her husband.
This essay reassesses Mary Tighe as a political poet by examining the overtly political poems in ... more This essay reassesses Mary Tighe as a political poet by examining the overtly political poems in her formerly unpublished two-volume illustrated manuscript collection Verses Transcribed for H.T. (Brompton, 1805), now available as an electronic edition at Romantic Circles (2014). Prior to the publication of Verses the only clearly political poems Tighe wrote appeared to be her famous ballad “Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure” and “There Was a Young Lordling, Whose Wits Were All Toss’d Up.” Verses lyrics such as “Cleuen An Elegy,” “Written on the Acquittal of Hardy &c – Decr 1794,” “Song to My Harp 1798,” or “Verses Written When a Detachment of Yeomen Were Sent Against the Rebel Army” reflect Tighe’s larger engagement with national politics, notably the 1794 Treason Trials, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, and the 1801 Act of Union. They also encourage political readings of readings of Tighe’s seemingly apolitical poems, such as “Address to My Harp” or “La Cittadina,” whose title in Verses emphasizes the poem’s references to the 1799 debates on the proposed act of union: “La Cittadina Written Jany 1799.”
This essay takes a close look at the impact Mary Tighe’s friendship with Thomas Moore had on her ... more This essay takes a close look at the impact Mary Tighe’s friendship with Thomas Moore had on her publishing history, both during her lifetime and after her death. Tighe’s letters and journals indicate that the negative reviews of Moore’s Epistles, Odes and Other Poems (1806) strengthened her commitment to coterie circulation and her resistance to moving any of her manuscripts into print beyond the limited private edition of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (1805), including a two-volume collection of her poems, ‘Verses Transcribed for H.T.’ (1805) and her novel Selena (c. 1803). After Tighe’s death her family posthumously published Psyche, with Other Poems (1811) with Longman as a monument to her excellence. Although Longman sought to publish Selena in 1818, Moore advised Longman against the novel’s publication, which did not occur until 2012. The novel’s sharp caricature of Moore as the hapless Edwin Stanmore may have played a role in his reluctance to advocate publication; so may his desire to preserve an idealized image of Tighe that is undermined by the novel’s violence.
Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire invo... more Despite critical attention to the many vampiric texts Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire invokes, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner has received barely any notice, although it is the one vampire text Rice specifically cites. This essay argues that the Rime provides a major structural and thematic template for the novel in pointing towards what Louis accomplishes in telling his life story to the interviewer: creating a vampire aesthetic that enables him to survive the ennui of immortality and work through his conflicted sense of himself. The pleasure he takes in telling the story of his life provides an alternate version of what he terms the ultimate experience of the vampiric kill: the re-enactment of one’s human death and vampiric rebirth. Through autobiography he actualizes what Rice brilliantly postulates as the component of vampiric existence that enables the most successful vampires to thrive: he locates an art form that suits and enhances his idiosyncratic nature. Whereas Coleridge’s mariner remains locked in a cycle of traumatic repetition, Rice recasts the mariner’s dilemma as a potential solution for Louis’s moral and existential crisis in offering an aesthetic that empowers him to perform his identity as a vampire on his own terms.
Female Voices: Forms of Women's Reading, Self-Education and Writing in Britain (1770-1830), ed. Eva Antal and Antonella Braida, 2022
This essay offers an overview of Mary Tighe’s lifelong commitment to scholarship and self-educati... more This essay offers an overview of Mary Tighe’s lifelong commitment to scholarship and self-education, values fostered by her mother, Methodist leader Theodosia Blachford, advocated in Psyche, discussed in Selena, documented in Verses, and sustained in her final work, a 181-page untitled journal that comments on nearly all the books she read between April 1806 and June 1809, comprising 228 entries on 246 literary, historical, religious, philosophical, political, and scientific texts written in English, French, Italian, and German. Tighe borrowed at least half of these texts from the Irish antiquarian and Italianist Joseph Cooper Walker, with whom she maintained a bookish correspondence between 1802 and 1809. Her 58 letters to Walker in tandem with her journal provide a rich archive of the impressive reading and research schedule she pursued during her final years, as she struggled against the debilitating illness that took her life in March 1810.
Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asap... more Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asaph in Wales (1874–1877), where he not only completed the studies that resulted in his ordination but also began to write poetry again, after a silence that commenced in 1868, when he determined to dedicate himself to the priesthood. On the fourth day of his arrival at St Bueno's, he "passed Mrs. Hemans' house," an event he recorded in his journal and mentioned the next day in a letter to his mother: "I walked to St. Asaph and passed the place where Mrs. Hemans lived and wrote and saw her monument in the Cathedral." Although Felicia Hemans was born in Liverpool (1793) and died in Dublin (1835), she passed most of her life in Wales (1800–1828). Akin to Hopkins, who wrote to his mother, "I have always looked on myself as half Welsh" (Correspondence, 1: 237), Hemans identified herself as a "naturalised Welshwoman." While critics like Catherine Brennan and Elizabeth Edwards rightly interrogate the nature of Hemans's nationalist enthusiasm for Wales, equivocally expressed in her Selection of Welsh Melodies and numerous lyrics situated in or about Wales, Jane Aaron notes that her contemporary Welsh audience hailed her as a "poet for Wales." Hopkins may not have read her poetry there, but he certainly knew it: in addition to the familiarity most schoolchildren had with "Casabianca," his mother owned four volumes of her poetry, she influenced the style of his father's poetry, and Hopkins notably categorized her as a member of the sentimental school of poetry in an 1881 letter to Richard Watson Dixon (Correspondence, 1: 505–506).9 Hopkins rarely referred to any female authors in his letters or journals, much less female poets, beyond his well-documented admiration for Christina Rossetti and his often-disparaging attention to Katherine Tynan. Indeed his position on masculinist power and poetic ability—that "masterly execution . . . is a kind of male gift and especially marks off men from women"—made him an infamous target of feminist critique in the 1970s and 1980s. None of the extant Hopkins scholarship examines Hemans's poetry in relation to his, but, surprisingly, several of the eleven major poems Hopkins wrote at St. Bueno's invoke Hemans, beginning with the poem that broke his long silence, "The Wreck of the Deutschland."
SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2021
Anna Seward commended Mary Tighe’s 1795 sonnet for the Ladies of Llangollen shortly before she co... more Anna Seward commended Mary Tighe’s 1795 sonnet for the Ladies of Llangollen shortly before she composed her own poem for Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, “Llangollen Vale” (1796). When Tighe revised her “Addressed to the Ladies of Llangollen Vale” for her 1805 collection Verses, she positioned it within a sonnet sequence that critiques Seward’s poem and Seward’s sonnet theories. Tighe’s critique highlights the different aesthetic values she and Seward espoused as private and public poets.
<1>Shortly after Mary Tighe's death in March 1810 her survivors produced three distinct collectio... more <1>Shortly after Mary Tighe's death in March 1810 her survivors produced three distinct collections of her poetry, each one using a different print mode to present their competing visions of her identity, her poetics, and her significance to disparate readerships. The first was Psyche, with Other Poems, published by the Longman group in conventional print for the general public in May 1811. No editor's name appears in the edition, which led to its false attribution to Tighe's brother-in-law and fellow poet William Tighe for nearly 200 years, but in 2011 Averill Buchanan definitively identified Tighe's husband Henry Tighe as the editor, and posited that he received some assistance from Tighe's brother John Blachford.(1) The second collection, Mary, a Series of Reflections During Twenty Years, also lacks a named editor, but internal evidence indicates that Tighe's mother Theodosia Blachford prepared this limited edition for a carefully chosen group of friends in the autumn of 1811, using a local press to print the volume in a hybrid mode that interspersed poems in manuscript with poems in print. The third, Poems by Mrs. H. Tighe, contains handwritten transcriptions of 20 Tighe lyrics in an undated bound manuscript signed by E. I. Fox.(2) Ironically, though Fox is the only one of the three editors who self-identifies, Fox's identity and connection to Tighe is not yet known, but the selections suggest Fox participated in Tighe's coterie, sharing verse and friendship with other members of Tighe's social circle. Husband, mother, friend: each editor stands in a particular relationship with Tighe, and, as this essay will argue, each editor embodies and recreates that relationship in the print mode they employ, the arrangements they devise, and the poems they select to pay tribute to Tighe, to memorialize her, and, ultimately, to monumentalize her as a projection of themselves. Akin to the familial editors Margaret Ezell describes in a formative essay on the posthumous publication of women's manuscripts, whose paratexts often "stress the fidelity of the printed text to the departed author's living voice," Henry
This essay explores the ways in which Mary Tighe's manuscript novel Selena restages characters an... more This essay explores the ways in which Mary Tighe's manuscript novel Selena restages characters and situations from Charlotte Smith's novels Emmeline and Celestina to advance the courtship novel's potential for resisting patriarchal enculturation. The parallels between Selena and Emmeline are striking: both protagonists leave home at seventeen and are stalked by their cousins; both meet their true loves after they commit to relationships with their cousins; both have older unhappily married female friends whose experiences partially represent their authors' autobiographies; and both sustain significant friendships with fallen women they try to help. Many of these parallels resurface in Celestina, which presents a second stalker in Montague Thorold, who serves as a model for a second stalker in Selena, Edwin Stanmore. Comparable to the radical revision of Apuleius Tighe presents in Psyche, Selena transforms episodes from Smith's novels to push harder on their proto–feminist politics, scripting harsher outcomes for the stalkers who pursue Selena and strengthening her psychological and moral autonomy. More than a homage, but not quite a correction, Tighe's attention to Smith in Selena reinterprets the work of a valued predecessor, engaging in what Susan Wolfson designates as a romantic interaction.
Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things. Ed. Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett, 2020
This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who inte... more This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.
In July 1806 William Hayley suggested that Mary Tighe publish an illustrated edition of Psyche; o... more In July 1806 William Hayley suggested that Mary Tighe publish an illustrated edition of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love, using engravings of George Romney’s Cupid and Psyche cartoons. Tighe declined, as she did all recommendations that she publish an edition of Psyche. Although she usually cited modesty as her rationale for not publishing, in this instance she pointed to the unsuitability of Romney’s illustrations for her narrative. The Romney cartoons closely adhered to Apuleius’s narrative of the Cupid and Psyche legend, and were sketched in 1777 to illustrate Hayley’s subsequently unfinished verse translation of Apuleius’s tale. This essay argues that Hayley tried to use Tighe’s Psyche to complete the unfinished project he wanted to pursue with Romney in the first days of their friendship, which would help him overcome the emotional paralysis he experienced in 1805-1806 as he struggled to move forward on his Life of Romney.
Women's Literary Networks and Romanticism. Ed. Andrew O. Winkles and Angela Rehbein, 2017
This essay looks at five Romantic-era women writers who invoke Mary Tighe in their works by name,... more This essay looks at five Romantic-era women writers who invoke Mary Tighe in their works by name, quotation, or epigraph--Anna Maria Porter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Alicia Lefanu, Lady Morgan, and Felicia Hemans--to consider what these invocations suggest about lines of affiliation, the construction of aesthetic communities, and attempts to shape or forecast reception. It argues that these woman writers create a citational network through the figure and work of Mary Tighe, to call attention to her significance and therein establish their own histories of influence and reception. Their citational practices produce a more expansive version of what Gerard Genette designates the ‘epigraph effect’ in Paratexts, affording opportunities for writers to signal their place in a cultural tradition, to acknowledge or choose their peers and predecessors, and to proleptically instantiate their consecration in a particular literary pantheon. They effectively create a canon of their own by building citational networks.
A Handbook of British Romanticism: Text and Theory. Ed. Ralf Haekel, 2017
Mary Tighe’s epic romance Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805) is a visionary poem in which Tigh... more Mary Tighe’s epic romance Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805) is a visionary poem in which Tighe shows that a woman poet can be inspired by the muse and employ the power of the gaze. Tighe re-imagines Apuleius’s story of Cupid and Psyche as a female-centered bildungsroman with a proto-feminist slant. The first two cantos of “Psyche” adapt many of the narrative events that shape the first two thirds of Apuleius=s tale, culminating with the dramatic moment of Psyche=s transgression, when she looks at Cupid and he leaves. Once Psyche begins her quest to win Cupid back, Tighe sets a new course. She takes Psyche through a dream-like allegorical landscape, where she faces morally ambiguous situations that reprise aspects of her transgression, testing her responses to what she sees, and what she acknowledges about what she sees. Psyche’s ability to solve these hermeneutic puzzles result in the restoration of her husband.
This essay reassesses Mary Tighe as a political poet by examining the overtly political poems in ... more This essay reassesses Mary Tighe as a political poet by examining the overtly political poems in her formerly unpublished two-volume illustrated manuscript collection Verses Transcribed for H.T. (Brompton, 1805), now available as an electronic edition at Romantic Circles (2014). Prior to the publication of Verses the only clearly political poems Tighe wrote appeared to be her famous ballad “Bryan Byrne, of Glenmalure” and “There Was a Young Lordling, Whose Wits Were All Toss’d Up.” Verses lyrics such as “Cleuen An Elegy,” “Written on the Acquittal of Hardy &c – Decr 1794,” “Song to My Harp 1798,” or “Verses Written When a Detachment of Yeomen Were Sent Against the Rebel Army” reflect Tighe’s larger engagement with national politics, notably the 1794 Treason Trials, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, and the 1801 Act of Union. They also encourage political readings of readings of Tighe’s seemingly apolitical poems, such as “Address to My Harp” or “La Cittadina,” whose title in Verses emphasizes the poem’s references to the 1799 debates on the proposed act of union: “La Cittadina Written Jany 1799.”
This essay takes a close look at the impact Mary Tighe’s friendship with Thomas Moore had on her ... more This essay takes a close look at the impact Mary Tighe’s friendship with Thomas Moore had on her publishing history, both during her lifetime and after her death. Tighe’s letters and journals indicate that the negative reviews of Moore’s Epistles, Odes and Other Poems (1806) strengthened her commitment to coterie circulation and her resistance to moving any of her manuscripts into print beyond the limited private edition of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (1805), including a two-volume collection of her poems, ‘Verses Transcribed for H.T.’ (1805) and her novel Selena (c. 1803). After Tighe’s death her family posthumously published Psyche, with Other Poems (1811) with Longman as a monument to her excellence. Although Longman sought to publish Selena in 1818, Moore advised Longman against the novel’s publication, which did not occur until 2012. The novel’s sharp caricature of Moore as the hapless Edwin Stanmore may have played a role in his reluctance to advocate publication; so may his desire to preserve an idealized image of Tighe that is undermined by the novel’s violence.
The Collected Letters of Mary Blachford Tighe, 2020
This annotated edition provides a revelatory glimpse into the life and mind of Ireland’s premier ... more This annotated edition provides a revelatory glimpse into the life and mind of Ireland’s premier Romantic-era woman poet, Mary Blachford Tighe (1772–1810). Although her family burned most of her personal papers, 166 letters written by and to Tighe survived the flames, and these are printed here for the first time. In this correspondence, Tighe’s discusses her personal relationships, travels, and daily activities while also reflecting on larger questions about politics, religion, society, and aesthetics. The letters written between 1786 and 1801 reveal stunning details about Tighe’s complex relationship with her voyeuristic husband, and they describe her time in England where she developed her craft as a writer and acquired her reputation as a much-admired beauty. The letters from this period are also important for exposing the lived realities that ground the proto-feminist ideology of her work. The letters from 1802 to 1809 feature exceptional information not only about her reading habits and scholarly studies, but also about her friendships with other writers and her resistance to publication. The Collected Letters of Mary Blachford Tighe presents a rich archive of materials offering new avenues for scholarship on Tighe, British Romanticism, and Anglo-Irish history. Not only do these letters shed light on some of the least-known periods in her life, but they also document her active cultural networks and her development as a poet and novelist.
Published here for the first time, Verses Transcribed for H.T. is a manuscript collection of 121 ... more Published here for the first time, Verses Transcribed for H.T. is a manuscript collection of 121 original lyric poems with 72 original illustrations that Mary Tighe prepared in 1805 as she was contemplating publishing a volume of poetry that would feature her epic romance "Psyche; or, the Legend of Love" accompanied by a selection of her lyrics. Instead she opted to print 50 copies of Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (London, 1805) without any additions from Verses in a small private edition that she dedicated and distributed to family and friends (her only publication). After she died her family published Psyche, with Other Poems (London, 1811), which offered a carefully culled and re-ordered selection of 29 lyrics from Verses (with 10 additional lyrics). Mary Tighe's Verses Transcribed for H.T. provides a truly unique opportunity to see Tighe as the determining editor of her own collected poems. Organized in deliberate clusters, Verses is a self-consciously constructed aesthetic artifact that radically revises prior knowledge of Tighe's literary, visual, and material production.
Uploads