Romantic poetry in romantic fiction: Byron & Austen
30 April @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
This talk concentrates on two protagonists of Romantic-period literature – one extremely famous in his time, Lord Byron, and the other, Jane Austen, hugely popular nowadays – as well as other popular early nineteenth-century novelists such as the Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth and the Scottish Susan Ferrier.
After exploring Byron’s views on women’s fiction and poetry (and considering whether he knew Austen’s novels), the focus will shift to Austen’s knowledge of Byron’s verse and the traces it left in her novels and letters. The talk will then open up a discussion of Byron’s presence in the fiction and letters of Austen’s contemporaries Edgeworth and Ferrier, with references to some later women novelists from the 1830s and 1840s.
Bringing together the bicentenary of Byron’s death in 2024 and the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth in 2025, this discussion celebrates the interconnections between two major literary figures as well as, more generally, how women novelists in the first half the nineteenth century repeatedly engaged with, questioned and reinvented Byron’s figure and poetry.
Professor Diego Saglia has worked at the Universities of Cardiff and Bath, and is now Professor of English Literature at the University of Parma (Italy). His research focuses on Romantic literature and culture, also in relation to other European traditions, and particularly on such figures as Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Felicia Hemans, and Walter Scott.
