TLRH | Fellow in Focus with Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews)

Recorded February 27, 2023. An 'in conversation' event featuring
Visiting Research Fellow Dr Susan Manly (University of St Andrews)
in conversation with Prof Aileen Douglas (Professor of English,
TCD) and organized by Trinity Long Room Hub. Susan Manly is a
Reader in English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Her
research interests are in Romantic-period Irish and English
literature. She is an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth
(1768-1849), the best-selling Irish contemporary of Jane Austen,
and has produced scholarly editions of a wide range of Edgeworth's
writings. She is currently completing a political biography of
Edgeworth. This will be the first account of Edgeworth's life to
appear in the last 45 years. It will provide a new assessment of
Edgeworth's intellectual and political life, looking at her
milieux, correspondences, allegiances, interventions, and
influence. Edgeworth's sustained engagements with debates about
Ireland, about slavery and about women will form a major part of
the story told in this biography. In 2019, Susan made a radio
documentary about Edgeworth, ‘A Radical Life’ which aired on RTÉ
Lyric FM in May 2019 and re-aired in May 2020. You can hear it
here. As part of Susan’s research for her new political biography
of Maria Edgeworth, she has been looking at Edgeworth’s attitude
towards West Indian and especially Jamaican slavery in the early
nineteenth century. Edgeworth’s fictions and plays often figured
emancipated African and Creole characters: for instance, her
celebrated novel, Belinda (1801) – originally entitled Abroad and
At Home – features two such characters. The extent and nature of
Edgeworth’s personal knowledge of and implication with the West
Indies, however, has never been fully established before. Educated
in Ireland and America, Aileen Douglas holds a PhD from Princeton
University. She began her academic career in the States, teaching
at Washington University in St. Louis for five years before
returning to Trinity to take up a position in the School of
English. Her research interests focus on the writing of the long
eighteenth century. In her monographs, 'Work in Hand: Print,
Script, and Writing, 1690-1820' (OUP 2017) and 'Uneasy Sensations:
Smollett and the Body' (Chicago 1996) she explores aspects of
embodiment, materiality, and literary representation. She also has
a particular interest in Irish writing and writing by women. Aileen
Douglas is a General Editor of the IRC-supported Early Irish
Fiction 1690-1820 series (Four Courts, 2011-) and has co-edited two
volumes for the series. Her co-edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The
Vicar of Wakefield for the Cambridge Collected Works of Goldsmith
is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2024. Learn more
at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/