Finding Elizabeth Hitchener (1783-1821) / Will Bowers, Oliver Clarkson, Andrew Hodgson

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bowers, Will, author.

Clarkson, Oliver, author.

Hodgson, Andrew, author.

Series:

Cambridge elements. Elements in eighteenth-century connections

Cambridge elements. Elements in eighteenth-century connections, 2632-5578

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hitchener, Elizabeth.

Hitchener, Elizabeth--Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2026

Summary:

"Elizabeth Hitchener (1783-1821) is best known to literary history for a brief but intense friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, during which he declared her ‘the sister of my soul’. When, in 1812, the friendship fell apart, Shelley turned on her. She was, he said,‘an ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman’. He labelled her ‘The Brown Demon’. This Element is the first biographical and critical study of a schoolmistress, letter-writer, and poet, whose achievements transcend Shelley’s denigrating characterisation. Drawing on fresh archival research, it uncovers a wealth of new information about Hitchener’s life and shows how she benefitted from and engaged with late eighteenth-century traditions of radical and proto-feminist thought. It offers a revisionary account both of Hitchener’s correspondence with Shelley — based on newly edited manuscripts — and her achievements as a poet, attending in particular to the generic and argumentative complexity of her topographical poem The Weald of Sussex (1822)"-- Cambridge Core

Contents:

Woman

Angel

Demon

Poet

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references

Online resource; title from PDF title page (Cambridge Core, viewed August 10, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version: Bowers, Will Finding Elizabeth Hitchener (1783-1821)

ISBN:

9781009837286

1009837281

9781009837293

100983729X

OCLC:

1578772849

Publisher Number:

CIPO000377264

CIPO000381856

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license