Michelle Faubert

The Fictional Suicides of Mary Wollstonecraft

Published by Literature Compass

2015 Suicide conveyed several distinct meanings in the Romantic period – unlike today, when it is most often attributed to mental illness. This meaning also existed in the long eighteenth century, but it was understood more broadly as irrationality and popularized through the emphasis on extreme passion and emotionalism as related to suicide in the literature of sentiment. William Godwin capitalized on this widely recognized and – to some extent – culturally ameliorative significance of suicide by casting his dead wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, as a character in a novel of sensibility when he reported her two suicide attempts in the Memoirs (1798)...

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12282/full

Introduction: Romanticism and Suicide

Published by Literature Compass

2015 This essay introduces the issue of Literature Compass that explores the topic of female suicide and Romantic literature, culture, and criticism. Although little critical work has been published on suicide and Romanticism to date, the subject addresses concerns that several major recent works on Romanticism have studied, such as the body and medicine, psychology, violence, and protest against political and domestic tyranny. Historically, too, the topic of Romanticism and suicide appears tangentially in well-known scholarship about melancholy, madness, genius, the sublime, and the transcendental...

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lic3.12285/full

Granville Sharp's manuscript letter to the admiralty on the Zong massacre: a new discovery in the British Library

Published by Slavery and Abolition

2016 During research at the British Library (BL) in May 2015, I discovered a previously unknown manuscript letter from 1783 by Granville Sharp to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The document concerns the case of the infamous Zong slave ship: Sharp wrote the letter to demand that the Admiralty bring murder charges against the crew of the Zong...

URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2016.1206285

A Family Affair: Ennobling Suicide in Mary Shelley's Matilda

Published by Essays in Romanticism

2013 Mary Shelley's 1819 novella, Matilda was published for the first time in 1959. Most scholars point to the scandalous subject matter of father-daughter incestuous passion as the root of the problem for publication, but this essay argues that the scandalous incest plot is largely a vehicle Shelley uses to explore another shocking topic: the right to commit suicide. The incest theme of Matilda serves Shelley's main argument that suicide may be regarded as virtuous, honourable, and even socially beneficial...

URL: http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3828/eir.2013.20.7