Professor Pamela Clemit

Supernumerary Fellow, Wolfson College

pamela.clemit@ell.ox.ac.uk

English literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
The Godwin-Shelley family of writers (Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), their associates and heirs
The 1790s
The literature of English religious nonconformity
Letters, journals, and autobiographical writings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
Textual editing and editorial theory
The political novel

I specialise in English literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. My work intersects with the fields of history, philosophy, and politics. My research is mainly devoted to the two generations of writers and intellectuals influenced by the French Revolution in Britain, with a particular focus on the anarchist political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836) and his associates. I have produced numerous scholarly and classroom editions of novels, life-writing, and other works by Godwin, as well as by Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. My principal research project is The Letters of William Godwin (2011-) which is being published in six volumes by Oxford University Press. The edition is providing authoritative, fully annotated texts of all known surviving letters from Godwin and a selection of previously unpublished letters to him. Two volumes have been published so far.

I continue to research and publish in other areas of interest. In 2017 I led a collaborative project to digitize and make publicly available the sole surviving manuscripts of Godwin’s principal works, Political Justice and Caleb Williams, which are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Images of the manuscripts are available to view on The Shelley Godwin Archive. I have written on letter writing as a social practice and on scholarly editing as a mode of historical enquiry. Other specialisms include the 1790s, the Wollstonecraft diaspora, the political novel, and the letters and journals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, broadly conceived.