Digital Editions

This archive promotes access to early British women's literary criticism, considering its contributions to women writers' increasing professionalization in a rapidly changing print culture and demonstrating women's influence on aesthetic standards and the construction of British cultural heritage. These works and others have contributed to our…

This digital edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, presents 25 copies of the work published between 1798, when it first appeared, and 1805, the fourth edition.

Erasmus Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants (1789) to popularize the Linnaean sexual system of botanical taxonomy by portraying the romances of personified stamens and pistils. But the text far exceeds this purpose, and with its combination of ornate verse, ample polymathic footnotes, and philosophical interludes, is a hybrid work of…

Part Seven focuses on the years when the ‘Lake Poet’, biographer, historian and social commentator Robert Southey was one of the most high-profile, and controversial, authors working in Britain.  Drawing on manuscripts from over 100 international archives, it makes available for the…