Romanticism and the Letter

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Romanticism and the Letter: Introduction

   • Madeleine Callaghan, Anthony Howe

   Pages 1-14

3. Romantic Letter Writing and the Publisher

   • Mary O’Connell

   Pages 15-27

4. The Letter and the Literary Circle: Mary Leadbeater, Melesina Trench, and the Epistolary Salon

   • Stephen C. Behrendt

   Pages 29-44

5. The Disappointment of Wordsworth’s Letters

   • Oliver Clarkson

   Pages 45-60

6. Two Wordsworths: Mountain-climbing, Letter-writing

   • Susan J. Wolfson

   Pages 61-82

7. ‘Hare and Hound’: Ends and Means in Coleridge’s Letters

   • Gregory Leadbetter

   Pages 83-98

8. The ‘Entire Man of Letters’?: Robert Southey, Correspondence and Romantic Incompleteness

   • Lynda Pratt

   Pages 99-115

9. Charles Lamb and the Rattle of Existence

   • Timothy Webb

   Pages 117-131

10. The Tensions of Jane Austen’s Epistolary Style

    • Joe Bray

    Pages 133-146

11. ‘Transported to your presence’: Leigh Hunt’s Letters to the Shelleys

    • Daniel Westwood

    Pages 147-162

12. ‘Foam is their foundation’: The Poetics of Byron’s Letters

    • Jane Stabler

    Pages 163-181

13. Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters

    • Madeleine Callaghan

    Pages 183-198

14. ‘The Varied Pauses of His Style’: Shelley’s Letters from Italy

    • Michael O’Neill

    Pages 199-218

15. John Keats’s Epistolary Intimacy

    • Andrew Bennett

    Pages 219-234

16. ‘don’t imagine it an a propos des bottes’: Keats, the Letter and the Poem

    • Anthony Howe

    Pages 235-251

17. ‘The house of misery’: Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

    • Angela Wright

    Pages 253-267

18. Back Matter

    Pages 269-277

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Romanticism and the Letter is a collection of essays that explore various aspects of letter writing in the Romantic period of British Literature. Although the correspondence of the Romantics constitutes a major literary achievement in its own right, it has received relatively little critical attention. Essays focus on the letters of major poets, including Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats; novelists and prose writers, including Jane Austen, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb; and lesser-known writers such as Melesina Trench and Mary Leadbeater. Moving from theories of letter writing, through the period’s diverse epistolary culture, to essays on individual writers, the collection opens new perspectives for students and scholars of the Romantic period.

• Print culture
• Epistolary
• Charles Lamb
• Material culture
• Poetry

“If the letters of Romantic period authors have for the most part been viewed as a supplement to the creative work, valuable for substance to the exclusion of literary qualities, Romanticism and the Letter does much to challenge this misconception while opening the way to further critical work on the epistolary culture and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century.” (Mary A. Waters, Biography, Vol. 45 (1), 2022)

“This volume is a timely contribution to larger trends in literary and media studies. … Romanticism and the Letter shows how important letter writing and epistolarity were to key Romantic authors, and opens a field for further explorations of Romantic epistolary culture.” (Rachael Scarborough King, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34 (3), 2022)

• University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

  Madeleine Callaghan

• Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

  Anthony Howe

Madeleine Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. Liverpool University Press published her first monograph, Shelley’s Living Artistry: The Poetry and Drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 2017, and her book, The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley (2019) is published by Anthem Press.


Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature at Birmingham City University. His publications include Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool, 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013), edited with Michael O’Neill. He is currently writing a monograph about literary letter writing in the British Romantic period.

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