Marilyn Butler, who died in 2014, was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and rector of Exeter College, Oxford, the first woman to head what had been a men’s college. Her books include Jane Austen and the War of Ideas and Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830 as well as a biography of Maria Edgeworth, whose works she also edited.
Anyone presuming to review works of modern literary theory must expect to be depressed by an encounter with large quantities of deformed prose. The great ones began it, and aspiring theorists...
Mary who? was the person I mostly seemed to be dealing with in the early Seventies, when I wrote a biography of the extraordinary woman whose works have now been collected for the first time,...
Hazlitt is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’,...
‘Authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but citizens.’ The spirit of Marilyn Butler’s excellent book on the Romantics is itself that of citizenship: of belonging...
One of the pleasures of reading Peacock in the Thirties, when I first read him, was that he was without acrimony. He enabled us to relive the great battles of ideas in the 19th century without an...
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