Lucy Newlyn

Lucy Newlyn is a poet and academic, professor of English Language and Literature, St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

Newlyn is a specialist in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetry.^[1]

Life and career

Lucy Newlyn was born in 1956 in Kampala, Uganda.^[2] She grew up in Leeds, where she attended Bennett Road Primary School and Lawnswood High School, winning an open scholarship to read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1974.^[3] She took up her Oxford place in 1975 and graduated with a Congratulatory First in 1978. Her D.Phil. thesis, supervised by Dr Roy Park, was later published as an Oxford English Monograph by Oxford University Press.^[4] While working on her doctorate, she held a series of temporary lectureships in various Oxford colleges.^[3] In 1984 (after a year as a lecturer at Christ Church) took up a Stipendiary Lectureship at St Edmund Hall.^[5] Two years later, she was elected as the A.C. Cooper Fellow and Tutor in English there – a permanent post which she has held in conjunction with a CUF Lecturership in the Oxford English Faculty.^[6] Newlyn gained the title Professor of English Language and Literature in 2005.^[5] She is Honorary Professor at the University of Aberystwyth,^[3] an Advisory Editor of the journal Romanticism,^[7] a Fellow of the English Association,^[8] and a Patron of the Wordsworth Trust.^[9] Following in Bernard O’Donoghue’s footsteps, she has been literary editor of The Oxford Magazine since 2011.^[10] She was co-founder, with Stuart Estell, of the Hall Writers' Forum, an online resource launched in 2013 for the exchange of writing and discussion of literature and the arts.^[11] Married to the economist Martin Slater, Lucy Newlyn has two step children and one daughter.^[12]

Work

Lucy Newlyn’s longstanding research interests are eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry and non-fictional prose in the Romantic period; influences on Romanticism; the reception of Romanticism; creativity and multiple authorship; allusion and intertextuality; reader-response and reception theory.^[13] She is an expert on Wordsworth and Coleridge,^[13] and has published extensively in the field of English Romantic literature, including four books with Oxford University Press and the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge.^[14][15] Her book Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize in 2001: 'a signal contribution to British Romantic studies and literary theory'.^[13][16]

Newlyn’s more recent research has concerned peripatetic traditions in poetry and prose; nature writing and environmentalism; regional identity and the poetics of place; the theory and practice of life-writing.^[13] Since 2003, she has been working on the prose of Edward Thomas.^[13] Her edition of his book Oxford came out in 2005.^[17] This was followed by several articles on Thomas, as well as Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry, co-edited with Guy Cuthbertson.^[18] She is general co-editor of Edward Thomas, Selected Prose Writings, a six-volume edition for Oxford University Press.^[19] Together, she and Cuthbertson have edited England and Wales and they are currently co-editing another volume, Pilgrimages.^[19] Newlyn has never strayed very far from her first love, English Romanticism, and her most recent book, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: All in Each Other (2013) brings together many of her longstanding and recent research interests.^[20]

Poetry

As well as an academic, Newlyn is a published poet and anthologist. Her first collection, Ginnel (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 2005) concerns her ‘intense local attachment’ to the streets and alleys of Headingley in Leeds, where she grew up.^[21] The collection featured in Woman’s Hour on 1 December 2005,^[22] and prompted four paintings by June Berry FRWS, shown in the Royal Watercolour Society’s ‘The Poet and the Painter’ exhibition at Bankside Gallery in November 2008.^[23] ‘Baking’ was ‘Highly Commended’ by the judges of the Forward Prize and re-printed in The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber and Faber, 2005).^[23] Poems from the collection have also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Yorkshire Post, Oxford Today, The English Review, and The Oxford Magazine.^[23][24] A recording of Ginnel, read by Sherry Baines, has been published as a ‘Daisy Book’ CD by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).^[23]

Newlyn second collection, Earth's Almanac (Enitharmon Press, 2015) emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of her sister.^[25] In this collection she adapts the form of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year.^[25]

In addition to her own poetry, Newlyn has published several anthologies of poetry and coordinated a number of collaborative writing projects. Together with Jenny Lewis, she was awarded a grant from Oxford University’s Institute for the Advancement of University Learning in 2002 to undertake research based on workshops at St Edmund Hall.^[26] Their findings (together with the students’ writing) were published in Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice (2003; 2004).^[27] Newlyn was poet-in-residence for The Guardian in November 2005.^[28] She ran university workshops on ‘The Craft of Writing’ with Christopher Ricks during his tenure as Professor of Poetry; and since 2001 she has run regular writing workshops for students at St Edmund Hall.^[26]

Selected publications

• Newlyn, Lucy; Gravil, Richard; Roe, Nicholas, eds. (1985). Coleridge's Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521033992. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (1986). Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (2001 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199242597. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (1993). "Paradise Lost" and the Romantic Reader (2001 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199242580. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (2000). Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. Winner of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize, 2001 (2003 paperback ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198187110. 
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521659093. 
• Newlyn, Lucy; Lewis, Jenny, eds. (2002). Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice. 1. Oxford: Holywell Press. ISBN 9780954508401. 
• Newlyn, Lucy; Lewis, Jenny, eds. (2004). Synergies: Creative Writing in Academic Practice. 2. Oxford: Holywell Press. ISBN 9780954508401. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (2005). Ginnel. Oxford Poets. Carcanet. ISBN 9781903039748. 
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2005). Chatter of Choughs: An Anthology Celebrating the Return of Cornwall's Legendary Bird. With illustrations by Lucy Wilkinson. Penzance: Hypatia Trust. ISBN 9781872229492. 
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2005). Edward Thomas: Oxford. Signal Books. ISBN 1902669851. 
• Newlyn, Lucy; Cuthbertson, Guy, eds. (2007). Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry. Enitharmon. ISBN 9781904634355. 
• Newlyn, Lucy; Cuthbertson, Guy, eds. (2011). Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition, England and Wales. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199558261. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (2013). William and Dorothy Wordsworth: 'All in Each Other'. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199696390. 
• Newlyn, Lucy (2015). Earth’s Almanac. Enitharmon. ISBN 9781910392102. 
• Newlyn, Lucy, ed. (2016). Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere Journal. The Folio Society. 

References