Olivia Murphy

Discipline, the second novel by the Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778-1818), was published in 1814. While less well known than its predecessor Self-Control (1811), it is nonetheless equally deserving of a central place in the canon of Romantic-era fiction. A wide-ranging novel, it shares many themes with contemporary fiction such as women’s difficulties in earning money and the horror of being falsely imprisoned in an insane asylum. However, it is Discipline’s innovative attempt at psychological realism that sets it apart from its contemporaries. Through the moral growth of its heroine Ellen Percy, Discipline insists on women’s self-determination, and their ability to become rational agents in a world that treats them as objects merely of desire or contempt. This edition is edited by Olivia Murphy who has added careful editorial notes and an insightful new introduction to the text.

by Mary Brunton

Discipline

Anne Collett

This book seeks to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present. The global climate disaster following Mt Tambora’s eruption in 1815 – the ‘Year without a Summer’ – is a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day, and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. The ‘Diodati circle’ that assembled in Geneva in 1816 – Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Polidori and John Cam Hobhouse and the gothic novelist MG ‘Monk’ Lewis – is synonymous with the literature of that dreary, uncanny season. Essays in this collection also consider the work of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with less well-known figures such as the scientist Luke Howard, and later responses to Romantic climates by John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf.

Olivia Murphy

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