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Cover image of The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe
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The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe

edited by Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney

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The most complete collection of Mary Tighe’s poetry published to date.

Mary Blachford Tighe (1772–1810) was a crucial force in shaping British Romanticism. Her influential six-canto epic, Psyche, or the Legend of Love (1805), along with her shorter poems, engaged the central issues of the period, often in advance of writers now considered canonical. With remarkable vitality and virtuosity, Tighe wrote about the tensions between love and loss, duty and desire, the spiritual and the sensuous, nation and family, and the Irish and the British, all while struggling with the debilitating illness that...

The most complete collection of Mary Tighe’s poetry published to date.

Mary Blachford Tighe (1772–1810) was a crucial force in shaping British Romanticism. Her influential six-canto epic, Psyche, or the Legend of Love (1805), along with her shorter poems, engaged the central issues of the period, often in advance of writers now considered canonical. With remarkable vitality and virtuosity, Tighe wrote about the tensions between love and loss, duty and desire, the spiritual and the sensuous, nation and family, and the Irish and the British, all while struggling with the debilitating illness that eventually claimed her life.

This scholarly edition collects for the first time dozens of recently discovered poems, accompanied by Tighe’s own illustrations, and identifies eight false attributions. A historical and biographical introduction from editors Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney discusses Tighe’s work within a larger social and political context, placing renewed emphasis on the conflicts she experienced as a Methodist with Anglo-Irish roots. Editorial annotations shed new light on Tighe’s life, revealing for the first time, for example, that her songs were performed during her lifetime on the Dublin stage.

Meticulously edited, this volume builds on recent pioneering scholarship to restore and burnish Tighe’s reputation as a major Romantic-era poet.

Reviews

Reviews

... Those interested in English literature will want this extremely well-annotated edition of a poet whose star is, after long neglect, on the rise. Highly recommended.

... beautiful, indispensable new edition of her poetry... The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe is a major editorial feat. As a scholar deeply committed to the recovery of women writers of the Romantic period, I am exceedingly grateful for this first-rate scholarly edition of Mary Tighe's poetry.

Academic libraries, especially those with strong English and Women’s Studies departments, will have readers interested in the work contained in this volume.

Thanks to efforts to recover female poets... Tighe is now read and taught, and there are three modern editions of her work. The most recent of these is the scholarly edition published by Johns Hopkins, which collects more than 120 poems, some published for the first time, and includes a critical introduction, explanatory notes and appendices... Its introduction provides a compelling and thorough biography, and the text itself is the most complete corpus of an unduly marginalized poet.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
640
ISBN
9781421418766
Illustration Description
79 halftones
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Notes on the Texts and Other Editorial Matters
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Brief Chronology
Introduction
Part I: Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805)
Part II: "Verses Transcribed for H

Acknowledgments
Notes on the Texts and Other Editorial Matters
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
Brief Chronology
Introduction
Part I: Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805)
Part II: "Verses Transcribed for H. T."
Volume I
Volume II
Part III: Late Poems and Fugitive Verse
Appendixes
1. False and Doubtful Attributions
2. Nineteenth-Century Poetic Response to Mary Tighe
3. Substantive Variants,
Psyche, or the Legend of Love, March 1849 Signed Holograph Manuscript
4. From
Mary, a Series of Reflections
5. Theodosia Blachford to Rev. Henry Moore: Extracts from Letters Concerning Mary Tighe
6. Inventory of Known Copies of
Psyche, or the Legend of Love (1805)
7. Addendum to Late Poens and Fugitive Verse by Mary Tighe
Bibliography
Index of Titles and First Lines

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Paula R. Feldman

Paula R. Feldman holds the C. Wallace Martin Chair in English and the Louise Fry Scudder Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. She is the editor of British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology and the coeditor of The Journals of Mary Shelley. Brian C. Cooney is an associate professor of English at Gonzaga University.