My first book, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examined the links between the novelist’s correspondence and his epistolary novels. As a result of this work, I’m co-editing a volume of letters for The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). My current research project is a book provisionally entitled Archiving the Self: The Ends of Letters in the Eighteenth-Century, which explores the desire for epistolary fame in a range of writers from Alexander Pope to Frances Burney through the examination of the textual content and material layout of their letters. It emerges from a broader interest in the peculiar history of the letter’s association with authorial character and celebrity, whose modern beginnings can be traced back to this period.
Other research interests include eighteenth-century satire (particularly by women poets and novelists), Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen.