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.
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
'The Second Nun's Tale', Chaucer Encyclopedia, 4 volumes,
online (Wiley Blackwell, 2023)
‘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)
