Freya Johnston is pro-vice-chancellor for education at the University of Oxford. She has written books about Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen and is the general editor of the Cambridge edition of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock. She is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Jane Austen with John Mullan.
She started off with A and ended up at B: born in 1743 as Miss Aikin, Anna Letitia died in 1825 as Mrs Barbauld. Poet, editor, biographer, essayist, pamphleteer and children’s writer, she was once known only for finding ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ improbable. Many of her poems were lost: one survives only in the form of its title, but even that scrap –...
In Crotchet Castle, Thomas Love Peacock rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His...
Q uite a few academics in British universities are still called ‘lecturers’ even if plenty of humanities students seem to think lecturing is unnecessary. They can see the point of...
M arilyn Butler , whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend...
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