Marie E. McAllister, Professor of English, has published a scholarly edition of Ann Flaxman’s An Uninteresting Detail of a Journey to Rome.
Romantic Circles Electronic Editions, with which McAllister’s book appears, publishes refereed editions of British literature from the late 18th and early 19th-centuries. In 1787 Ann Flaxman set out for France and Italy with her husband, the sculptor John Flaxman. The comically-titled journal she kept during her travels tells the story of a female Grand Tour, something quite rare, and of an extended artist’s visit to Italy, something quite common. Her perceptive and entertaining manuscript, located in the British Library, has been known to scholars but never previously published. The Journey serves as an excellent introduction to English travel writing just before the French Revolution, and to the 18th-century international arts scene. It also reveals the challenges and rewards of being an atypically poor continental traveler and an aspiring woman writer.
Romantic Circles editions include extensive scholarly introductions and appropriate scholarly apparatus for texts edited to the highest editorial standards. They are published in TEI-compliant XML. TEI renders archival quality text for better preservation and future access. Dr. Patrick Murray-John, former Instructional Technology specialist at UMW, assisted with the coding. This project was supported by a UMW faculty development grant and a 2005 sabbatical.