The Regions of Sara Coleridge's Thought

'Sara Coleridge, like Virginia Woolf, shaped the consciousness of her times. Widely acknowledged as a brilliant literary critic, Sara Coleridge was also a poet, a novelist, a profound philosophical thinker, and a formidably accomplished editor. To Thomas De Quincey her achievements were astonishing; for Elizabeth Barrett she was the most learned woman of the day. Her opinionated, crest-perky prose always surprises and entices. Yet, until now, Sara Coleridge has been absent from anthologies of Victorian writings, ignored in histories of English literature.
Peter Swaab's splendid new edition of Sara Coleridge's Selected Literary Criticism is particularly welcome for making this outstanding nineteenth-century author available to new generations of readers.
Included here are Sara Coleridge's clear-sighted reflections on her own achievements as novelist, translator, poet, theologian, essayist, and reviewer. Here too are her influential commentaries on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, alongside generous samples from her own published works. Extracts from her colorful and outspoken correspondence bear witness to Sara Coleridge's remarkable cultural intelligence-and few escaped her scrutiny. In this book are unsparing sketches of John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Dorothy Wordsworth, Dickens, Gaskell, Newman, Carlyle, Tennyson, Emerson, and the Brontes.
In his judicious selection, astute introduction and supporting materials, Peter Swaab is Sara Coleridge's exemplary editor. The Regions of Sara Coleridge's Thought shows us a woman of genius commanding an extraordinary age and making it her own. Now all readers can discover in this enthralling selection of her writings exactly how she did so.' - Nicholas Roe, professor of English Literature, University of St. Andrews 'Swaab's selection is carefully chosen and excellently arranged, and his introduction and notes provide expert