The Cambridge Edition of Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

This is the first ever complete critical edition of the writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), including work printed in her lifetime and material left in manuscript form at her death. Textual analysis, based on print and manuscript copies in repositories across the United Kingdom and the United States, reveals her revision processes and uses of manuscript and print. Extensive commentary clarifies her techniques, sources, contexts, and diction. A detailed essay traces the history of her works' reception and transmission. The result is a complete view of her achievements that will promote more accurate assessments of her contributions to literary and cultural shifts, including perspectives on literary value, women's equality, religion, and affairs of state. This first volume provides established texts of Finch's early manuscript books, including Poems on Several Subjects and Miscellany Poems with Two Plays written under her pen name, Ardelia.

“'With remarkable success and rigor, Jennifer Keith's and Claudia Kairoff's first volume of the Works of Anne Finch investigates and analyzes complex sets of evidence and revisions in manuscript and in print, providing an extensive scholarly apparatus and historical notes on the conditions of production, not just of Finch's own writing but of its reception and publication. Rivaling the best examples of traditional critical editions, the Works of Anne Finch offers fresh approaches to questions of variants and emendations while supplying a clean, readable text of Finch's extensive literary production.' Citation, Society for Textual Scholarship”

'… a major event in English literary studies … The literary world is fortunate that Finch's complicated canon met its match in the editorial skills and intellectual commitment of Jennifer Keith and the team of talented experts she assembled … Anne Finch's poetry is the expression of her heart, the expression of an age, and the expression of the general human condition. In other words, she is a major poet whose works are finally accorded in this edition the establishment of texts and contexts needed for literary history to begin to acknowledge that fact.' Elizabeth Kraft, The Scriblerian
'Henceforth, no scholar of Anne Finch's poetry can write about her oeuvre without studying these two volumes.' Ellen Moody, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer
'On page after page, readers of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea will find poems that have been edited carefully, interpreted in ways that encourage future scholarship, and supported by clear and sufficient notes. The creators of this edition have done a great service to the field, and their work deserves to be used, and celebrated, for a long time.' Melissa Schoenberger, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Jennifer Keith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she has taught since 1997. She is the author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (2005) and numerous essays on poetry from the Restoration to the Romantic era. With the staff of the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro she developed The Anne Finch Digital Archive, an open-access site that supplements this edition. Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff were awarded a long-term fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library for work on this edition. Keith also received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant for this critical edition and the digital archive. She is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Claudia Thomas Kairoff is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where she has taught since 1986. She is the author of Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (1994) and Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (2012), and co-editor, with Catherine Ingrassia, of 'More Solid Learning': New Critical Perspectives on Alexander Pope's Dunciad (2000). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on Pope and on women poets. Kairoff and Jennifer Keith were awarded a long-term fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library for work on this edition. She is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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