Skip to main content
School of English and Drama
  1. School of English and Drama
  2. English
  3. People
  4. Profiles

Dr Jenny McAuley

Jenny

Modern Humanities Research Association Postdoctoral Research Associate

Email: jenny.mcauley@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

I joined the School of English and Drama in January 2022 as an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate, providing research assistance on Volume Four of Professor Pamela Clemit’s six-volume Oxford University Press edition of The Letters of William Godwin. I completed undergraduate and Master’s studies in English literature at Merton College, Oxford, and St John’s College, Cambridge, and obtained my PhD in English Studies from the University of Durham. My doctoral thesis was on representations of Gothic abbey architecture in British Romantic-period poetry and fiction by authors including Ann Radcliffe and George Gordon, Lord Byron.

In my postdoctoral career so far, I have held research assistantships at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford (on Professor Kathryn Sutherland’s digital edition of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts), and at the University of Durham (on Volume Two of Professor Pamela Clemit’s Oxford University Press edition of The Letters of William Godwin). I have also worked as a Lecturer in English at St Hilda’s and Hertford Colleges, Oxford, and provided occasional teaching on Romantic-period literary topics in the School of English and Drama here at QMUL.

Research

Research Interests:

  • Romantic-period British and Irish literature
  • Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript studies
  • Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s writing
  • The Gothic and its associated literary and aesthetic cultures in Britain and Ireland

Recent and On-Going Research

I am currently planning publications on engagements with Ireland in the lives and writings of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft that will develop from my research on Volumes Two and Four of Godwin’s Letters, and from previous teaching at QMUL on both Wollstonecraft and other Romantic-period women writers’ lives in Ireland.  

 

Publications

as editor), Florence Macarthy: An Irish Tale (1818), by Sydney Owenson. Chawton House Library Women’s Fiction series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Reissued in paperback by Routledge (2016).

‘From the Education of Daughters to the Rights of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft in Ireland, 1786-7’, History Ireland, 24:1 (Jan./Feb. 2016), 22-5.

Review essay on Mary Hays, Female Biography, ed. Gina Luria Walker, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013), Enlightenment and Dissent, 30 (2015), 116-22.

(with Pamela Clemit), ‘William Godwin’s Visit to Ireland in 1800: Between the Rebellion and the Union’, History Ireland, 23:4 (July/Aug. 2015), 22-4.

(with Pamela Clemit) ‘Sociability in Godwin’s Diary: The Case of John King’, Bodleian Library Record, 24:1 (2011), 51-6.

‘ “A Long Letter Upon a Jacket and Petticoat”: Reading Beneath Some Deletions in Catharine, or The Bower’, Persuasions: The Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, 31 (2009) 191-8.

Public Engagement

Public Writing

  • ‘Bath’s Dark Gothic Past’ [feature on Gothic novelists associated with city of Bath], Bath Magazine, 181 (Oct. 2017), 44-5; and at https://thebathmagazine.co.uk/baths-dark-gothic-past/
  • ‘Principle and Passion’ [feature on bicentenary of Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816)], Jane Austen’s Regency World, 84 (Nov./Dec. 2016), 23-31.
  • ‘Are These the Greatest Books by Women You’ll Never Read?’ Guardian (Books blog), 5 Aug. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/greatest-books-by-women-you-will-never-read
  • Between 2016 and 2020 I have also co-authored (with Pamela Clemit) nine new and replacement entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on figures researched during the preparation of annotations for Volumes I and II of The Letters of William Godwin.

 

Podcasts

Back to top