Molly Watson

Thesis title:

Motherhood, Children and Loss in the Works of Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley, 1820-44

This thesis will explore themes of motherhood and loss in a group of hitherto relatively unexplored writings by Sara Coleridge and Mary Shelley, including: Coleridge’s Phantasmion (1837), Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834), and Shelley’s Proserpine (1820), Maurice (1820), and Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844).

The project will contribute to an understanding of three areas identified by scholars as crucial to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Romantic period culture: women’s writing; literature for and about children; and ‘late Romanticism’ (i.e., British literary culture of the 1820s-1850s).

Research Area

English Language and Literature
Languages and Literature

Publications

Blog posts:

'Polar Gothic: Dan Simmons's The Terror (2007) as Ancient Mariner Narrative' for the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) Blog, 22 December 2022.
'Cyborg John Keats: Dan Simmons's Hyperion/Endymion Cantos' for The Romantic Ridiculous Blog, 5 December 2022.
'On This Day 1822 - Percy Shelley's Gothic Authorship' for the BARS Blog, 8 July 2022.
'An Introduction to Percy Shelley's Gothic Fiction' for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism Graduate Student Caucus (NASSR), 17 February 2021.

Conferences

"Finding Edith Coleridge's Voice (1832-1911)" - Coleridge Conference, August 2024.

"(Maternal) communities of storytelling in Mary Shelley's Proserpine (1820)" - British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) Romantic Making/Unmaking, University of Glasgow, July 2024.

"Sara Coleridge and the (un)born child addressee" - Wordsworth Summer Conference, August 2023.

"Venus Fairy-landensis: Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837) and the Nineteenth Century Fairy Tale" - BARS PGR/ECR Conference, University of Edinburgh, June 2023.

"Percy Shelley's Gothic (Dis)connections" - BARS Disconnections/Reconnections, August 2021.

"Occultism, Demonology and the Dead in Percy Shelley's Gothic Fiction" - University of Huddersfield Research Festival, June 2021.

"'Arising from the state of intellectual sickliness and lethargy': A Re-evaluation of Percy Shelley's Gothic Fiction" - Romantic Reputations, April 2021.

"Radical Shelley? The Victorian Myth" - London Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar Graduate Strand (LNCSSGS) 'Struggle, Upheaval, Transformation', January 2021.

"(Im)mortality and the Female Muse in the Poetry of John Keats" - BARS Romantic Futurities, June 2020.

Public Engagement & Impact

Former co-organiser of A New Chapter @UoN, a reading group for English PGRs.

Other Research Interests

I am interested in the long nineteenth century (1780-1918):

Death and mourning

Romantic families

Children's literature/literature about childhood

Late Romanticism (1820s-50s)

The Keats-Shelley/Byron circles

Album cultures

Nineteenth century Russian literature

Gothic

Memberships

Member of British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), January 2021-present.
Member of British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS), January 2022 - present.
Member of British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS), January 2022 - present.
Member of The Friends of Coleridge, January 2023 - present.
Member of The Charles Lamb Society, January 2023 - present.
Member of The Byron Society, January 2023 - present.

Scholarships and Prizes

Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Studentship Award (2021-25).

Vice-Chancellor's Fee Waiver Scholarship for MRes, University of Huddersfield (2020-21).

Best Overall Performance Award for English Literature at the University of Huddersfield, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Execellence Scholarship at the University of Huddersfield (2017-20).