Finding Elizabeth Hitchener (1783–1821) by Will Bowers, Oliver Clarkson, and Andrew Hodgson, is the first critical study of a neglected Romantic-period schoolmistress and poet. Drawing on newly uncovered archival evidence and a fresh examination of Hitchener’s writings, the book presents an account of Hitchener’s rich personal, intellectual, and literary life. It demonstrates her achievements as a celebrated teacher, an enterprising letter writer, and a distinctive poet of place.
Hitchener is best known to literary history for her formative intellectual influence on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their friendship, borne on an impassioned ‘polemical’ correspondence, gave rise to social and political scandal and ultimately broke apart in acrimony. Its peak coincided with Shelley’s visit to Dublin in the early months of 1812 on a political crusade he hoped would bring about ‘the peace, the harmony, and the happiness of Ireland, England, Europe, the World’.The letters Shelley and his wife Harriet wrote to Hitchener from Ireland are the most important record of their activities there and reveal Hitchener’s influence on Shelley’s radical politics. Hitchener’s correspondence with Shelley was also the point of origin for Shelley’s first long poem Queen Mab, ‘a picture of the manners, simplicity, and delights of a perfect state of society’ composed during a second visit to Ireland – this time to Killarney – in 1813.
This event will tell the story of Shelley’s friendship with Hitchener, in which Ireland held profound significance as a place of personal refuge and political experiment, as well as introducing Finding Elizabeth Hitchener and the life and work it uncovers. Authors Will Bowers (QMUL), Oliver Clarkson (Oxford), and Andrew Hodgson (Birmingham) will each give short talks, followed by comments from Fiona Stafford (Oxford). The program will be chaired by Elisa Cozzi (Notre Dame).
A reception will follow the speaking program.
About the speakers
Will Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London. He has written widely on English poetry—including Byron, Milton, the Shelleys, and Wordsworth—and his first book, The Italian Idea, was published in 2020. He has a forthcoming book on Shelley and Greece and is currently editing a new edition of William Cowper’s Poems, Hymns, and Letters for Oxford World’s Classics. He is an editor on the new three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Oliver Clarkson is Departmental Lecturer (1660–1830) in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall. He is an editor on the new three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley and he is writing a book about Wordsworth and imperfection.
Andrew Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Birmingham. He is preparing an edition of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book and Other Writings and is an editor on the new three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Elisa Cozzi is the 2025–26 National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. She specialises in Irish, British, and Italian literary culture in the Romantic period, with a focus on the circulation of Irish manuscript material, radical ideas, and literary influence across European coteries. She is an editor on the new three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Fiona Stafford is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. The author of many books, including a biography of Jane Austen, she also wrote and presented the highly acclaimed "The Meaning of Trees" for BBC Radio 3's The Essay. Her book The Long, Long Life of Trees, published by Yale University Press in 2017, was a Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year, and she is the editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Classic anthology Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest.