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.

Marie E. McAllister, Profesor of English, has had an article chosen for republication in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, vol. 271 (2013). Entitled “‘Only to Sink Deeper’: Venereal Disease in Sense and Sensibility,” the article first appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.1 (2004): 87-110.

Marie E. McAllister

Marie E. McAllister, Professor of English, participated in the workshop “Liberate the Text! (While Creating a Publishable Digital Textual Edition)” run by 18thConnect and attended the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference in March.

Marie E. McAllister, Professor of English, has published an article in Source: Notes on the History of Art. “A Flaxman Mystery Solved: Lalande, Flaxman’s Venice Visit, and the Attribution of British Library Add. MS 39890” grows out of McAllister’s work on the 18th-century travel writer Ann Flaxman, wife of the famous British sculptor John Flaxman (1755-1826). A series of fortuitous discoveries in library archives enabled McAllister to demonstrate that a manuscript long taken as a significant source on John Flaxman’s travels and education was in fact a translation from a French travel book, not an actual travel journal. UMW colleague Marjorie Och helped suggest an ideal publication venue for this discovery, which will be of interest to historians of Neoclassical art as well as scholars working on travel literature.