Marilyn Butler lecture: ‘Mary Wollstonecraft for the Twenty-First Century’

We're delighted to welcome Professor Emma Clery (University of Uppsala) to the English Faculty for the 2023 Marilyn Butler lecture on 17 October at 5.30pm.

Virginia Woolf famously said of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), that she remains ‘alive and active…we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living’. Ninety years later, in 2019, a special issue of the online journal Romantic Circles was devoted to the endurance of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaneity. It has been objected that insistence on her direct relevance obscures the historically rooted nature of her life and ideas. In this talk, Professor Emma Clery (University of Uppsala) examines the dialectical role of archival research and scholarly editing in reshaping the sense that Wollstonecraft speaks to the present moment, with particular reference to Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler’s landmark edition of the Works published in 1989, and to current work on a new collected edition to be published by Oxford University Press.

No booking required; seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.