Romantic Appropriations of History: The Legends of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson focuses on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and on various historical tales, either written or translated, by one of her very close friends, Margaret Holford Hodson. While Baillie’s plays have garnered significant critical attention over the past few years, little has been written about her poetry. Further, virtually no attention has been given to Hodson’s works, yet critic Stephen Behrendt argues that her Margaret of Anjou is a “minor masterpiece that has not been accorded the attention it deserves.” Romantic Appropriations of History offers a look at how two early nineteenth-century women, each under her own “anxiety of influence,” appropriated original tales to produce completely new texts of political and cultural significance. The book addresses appropriation and translation in various ways and provides an introduction to the lives and alliances of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson, both to each other and to two significant poets and friends who were proponents of this historical tradition in literature—Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Employing the language of fancy, Baillie and Hodson joined the pathos of historical situations and archetypical characters with their own cultural and ethical sensibilities at a time of literary, social, and political disorder. The atmosphere not only provided Baillie and Hodson with the therapeutic power of appropriating history, but it also established them as creative, political women with distinct voices in a patriarchal, yet dynamic, nineteenth-century world.

Closet Stages examines theater theory produced by middle- and upper-class British women-playwrights, actresses, and spectators-between 1790 and 1840. Shifting the focus away from the Romantic male writers to the journals, letters, and play prefaces in which women framed their relationship to the theater arts, Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage."

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.