Organisation : Pr. Isabelle Bour, Claire Boulard et le Professeur Susan Manly de l’Université
de St Andrews

Contact : edgeworth-in-Paris@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Website: https://edgeworth-paris2025.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/


Présentation

This colloquium will focus on Maria Edgeworth and her family, and especially on their stay in Paris in 1802-3, so we particularly welcome papers relating to Edgeworth herself; but we envisage a wider remit. As a writer and thinker, Edgeworth’s imagination and analytical powers were deeply engaged with the ideas flowing between France, Switzerland, England, Ireland, and the Scandinavian and Nordic countries. After 1803, Edgeworth read voraciously in Francophone literature; her works were translated into French, Spanish and Italian, among other languages, and her educational thought and writings for children gained influence across Europe.
This transcultural presence and engagement makes her a figure with whom we can think productively about transnational networks of ideas. Edgeworth’s contact with various salonnières also allows us to reflect on the involvement of female thinkers in the supposedly masculine worlds of politics and law-making. Edgeworth’s fascination with Staël and other French writers stimulates explorations of the ways in which literature permits the adoption and adaptation of imaginaries across national borders. We invite proposals for 25-minute papers focusing on Maria Edgeworth in Paris and/or on the related fields of enquiry outlined here.
We are also open to proposals for papers centring on writers other than Edgeworth which amplify our sense of the individuals, networks, and influences which she could have encountered in France in the period of the Peace of Amiens and beyond.