Emma Clery

Short presentation

Emma Clery is Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Uppsala University. She specialises in British Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries, print culture, women’s writing and the cultural history of economics.

She is currently Co-General Editor (with Prof Mary Fairclough) of the Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft for Oxford University Press, and is engaged in textual editing of Wollstonecraft’s literary works and (with Prof Nancy E. Johnson) the correspondence.

Keywords

• English Literature
• Jane Austen
• Mary Wollstonecraft

Biography

Emma Clery has previously worked at Keele University, and at Sheffield Hallam University in the post of Senior Research Fellow with the AHRB-funded Corvey Project on Romantic-Era Women’s Writing. From 2005 to 2020 she held the position of Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at University of Southampton, with responsibilities for developing the link with Chawton House Library, a centre for the study of early women’s writing with a unique collection of rare books. For the period 2013 to 2016 she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship, resulting in the publication of two books, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017; winner of the British Academy Rose Crawshay Prize 2018), and Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister (Biteback, 2017).

At Uppsala University she leads a major project to produce a six-volume scholarly edition of the Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft with an international team of contributing editors, supported by the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Swedish Institute, Paris; the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Modern Humanities Research Association. She has recently held research fellowships at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Gakushuin University, Tokyo, the Swedish Institute in Paris, and as part of the ‘Democracy and Higher Education’ Programme at Uppsala University. Her teaching includes the research-led online course ‘Jane Austen as Global Author’.

She has taken part in BBC Radio 4 programmes In Our Time, Opening Lines and Woman’s Hour, and writes for the Times Literary Supplement. 

Research

Current research interests include Jane Austen, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, and economics and literature from 1700 to 1830.

Interviews Online

The Cock Lane Ghost, interview with Dominic Gerrard on research for The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (CUP, 1995) in the series Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire, 2025. 

Wollstonecraft, Revisited, Interview with Kate Moffat and Kandice Sharren, on plans for the new Oxford University Press edition of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, The Women’s Print History Project Monthly Mercury, Season 3, Episode 2, 2022.

Anti-War Sentiment in Britain and the Poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven by Anna Letitia Barbauld, interview with Zack White about the research for Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (CUP, 2017), in the series The Napoleonicist, 2021.

Publications include:

Books

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister (Biteback, 2017).

Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, ‘Writers and Their Work’ series, gen. ed. Isobel Armstrong (Northcote House Press / The British Council, 2000).

The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Edited Works

Ed. with Peter Garside and Caroline Franklin, Authorship, Commerce, and the Public: Scenes of Writing 1750-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Ed. with Robert Miles, Gothic Documents 1700-1820 (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Ed., Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, rev. edn. (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).

Ed., Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, rev. edn. (Oxford World's Classics, 1996).

Articles and Book Chapters (since 2000)

‘The early writings and Sense and Sensibility’, The Oxford Handbook of Jane Austen ed. Freya Johnston and John Mullan (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026).

‘Milton’s Satan and Industrialization’, in Writing the Industrial Revolution, Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Industry and Literature, 1770-1830 electronic resource, project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, University of Leeds, 2024.

‘The Place of William Cowper in Jane Austen’s Thought-World: ”Our Garden is Putting in Order”,’ Persuasions no. 44 (2022), pp. 15-34.

‘Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century and the Emergence of Political Economy,’ The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics, ed. Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 50-66.

(with Bee Rowlatt), ‘Remembering Mary Wollstonecraft: A Conversation,’ Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies17.2 (Summer 2021), Special Issue: ‘Nineteenth-Century Women’s Campaign Writing: Broadening the Realm of Women’s Civic Engagement,’ Guest-Edited by Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson.

‘Revising the Professional Woman Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Precarious Income,’ The Huntingdon Library Quarterly, Special Issue: Women’s Book History, 84:1 (Spring 2021), pp. 27-38.

‘Mary Wollstonecraft: A Feminist Exile in Paris,’ Literaria Pragensia, 29: 57 (2019), 29-46. Open Access.

‘Conversations on Political Economy in Sanditon,’ Persuasions Online, 38:2 (Spring, 2018). Open Access.

‘‘‘That is Capital”: Views of London in Pride and Prejudice’, in Jane Austen’s Geographies, ed. Robert Clark (Routledge, 2017), pp. 156-74.

‘Free Market Feminism? The Political Economy of Women’s Writing,’ in Women's Writing 1660-1830: Feminisms, Fictions and Futures ed. Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 33-50.

‘Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Ethics of Free Trade Imperialism,’ in British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates, ed. Mark Canuel (Routledge, 2015), pp. 349-59.

‘Novels of the 1750s’, The Oxford History of the Novel, Volume 2, 1750-1820, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 73-91.

‘Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems,’ in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 173-94.

‘To dazzle let the Vain design: Alexander Pope’s Portrait Gallery and the Impossibility of Brilliant Women’, in Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 39-59.

‘Jane Austen and Gender’, Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 159-75.

‘Horace Walpole, the Strawberry Hill Press, and the Emergence of the Gothic Genre’, Ars & Humanitas, 5:1-2 (2010), pp. 93-112.

‘Women’s Writing and the Luxury Debate’, A History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 4, 1690-1750, ed. Ros Ballaster (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 40-60.

‘Austen and Masculinity’, A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L Johnson and Clara Tuite (Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 332-342.

‘The Genesis of Gothic: Sources and Beginnings’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature ed. Jerrold Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 21-39.

‘Horace Walpole’s ‘The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire’ in Gothic ed. Fred Botting (Boydell & Brewer, 2001), pp. 23-46.