Academic Books & Essays
My work has largely focused on life-writing -
the stories we tell about ourselves and others, especially about lives
that are often misrepresented, including those of seventeenth-century nuns:
brave women who lived in exile during periods of persecution.
I’m interested in sensory history:
how we feel the world through and within our bodies,
the pluralities of experience from which our minds make meaning.
I also write about literature, ranging from medieval to contemporary,
encompassing the genius of Chaucer, through the whirligig of Woolf,
up to the present day.
Selected Publications:
Books -
The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800:
Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (2013)
English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Life Writing I (2012)
Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing
of the Early Modern Period (2007)
Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession
in a Seventeenth Century Convent: ‘How Sister Ursula was once
bewitched and Sister Margaret twice’ (2007)
Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/biography
in the Twentieth Century (1999)
Chapters & Essays -
‘Chaucer’s Women’, in A New Companion to Chaucer,
ed. Peter Brown (2000; 2019)
‘Interpretive Communities: Female Religious Houses’,
Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Religion,
ed. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (2017)
‘Shakespeare’s Sisters: Anon and the Authors in Early Modern Convents’,
in Communities, Culture and Identity: The English Convents
in Exile, 1600-1800,
ed. Caroline Bowden and James Kelly (2013)
‘”Anxiously Yours”: the Epistolary Self and the Culture of Concern’,
in SAGE Biographical Research, ed. John Goodwin (2012)
‘Paradise Postponed: the Nationhood of Nuns in the 1670s’
in Religion, Culture and the National Community in the 1670s,
ed. Tony Claydon and Tom Corns (2011)
‘”So short a space of time”: Early Modern Convent Chronology
and Carmelite Spirituality’, Journal for Medieval & Early Modern Studies (2012)
‘Philip Sidney in the Cloister: the Reading Habits of English Nuns
in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp’, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (2012)
‘Anne Clifford as Orlando: Virginia Woolf’s feminist
historiology and women’s biography’, rep. in Ashgate Critical Essays
on Women Writers in England, 1500-1700, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (2009)
‘Did Mrs Danvers Warm Rebecca’s Pearls?
Significant Exchanges and the Extension of Lesbian Space
and Time in Literature’, Feminist Review (2003)
‘Reading and Writing Auto/biography: the Displacement
of Lesbian Subtexts’, Women: A Cultural Review (1998)
