I am thrilled to report that I have a forthcoming edited collection, provisionally titled Frances Burney and the Muses. Interartistic Conversations, coming out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in Burney studies provides an innovative, interdisciplinary critical consideration of the relationship of one of the major authors of the long English Romanticism with the arts. The encounter was not devoid of tensions, as the chapters confirm, and indeed often required a degree of wrangling on Burney’s part. As evidenced by its complex biographical implications, this was a revealing and at times contentious dialogue, allowing us to reconstruct in an original and highly focused way the feminine negotiation with such key concepts of the late Enlightenment and Romanticism as virtue, reputation, creativity, originality, artistic expression, and self-construction. Each form of artistic expression is addressed separately, yet the contributors emphasise the interconnections between these mutually reinforcing forms of neighbouring artistic activities as components of a broader spectrum of interartistic and intermedial cultural signification. While there is now a flourishing body of work on Frances Burney and, more broadly, Romantic women authors, Frances Burney and the Muses. Interartistic Conversations concentrates for the first time ever on the rich artistic and material context that surrounded, supported, and shaped Frances Burney’s oeuvre.

I shall update this post with further news and, hopefully, the cover of the book in the coming weeks. Keeps your eyes peeled.