Deirdre Coleman

Deirdre Coleman holds the Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne. Her publications include Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester UP, 1999), and Coleridge and 'The Friend' (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Deirdre Coleman reviews ‘The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry’ edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane

March 2009, no. 309 • 01 March 2009

The Cambridge Companion series has been a very successful venture, presenting readers with handy, up-to-date collections of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars on a wide range of authors and topics. This co-edited volume on British Romantic poetry encompasses many of the key topics in Romantic literary studies of the last two decades: historicism, canonisation, antiquarianism, Gothic ... (read more)

Deirdre Coleman reviews 'Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World' by Lydia Wevers

March 2011, no. 329 • 01 March 2011

At the centre of Reading on the Farm stands a large colonial library of just over 2000 volumes. The library belonged to Brancepeth Farm, a sheep station in the Wairarapa Valley of New Zealand, which, at its height in the late 1890s, employed more than three hundred staff. Brancepeth’s library, consisting principally of contemporary Victorian fiction, about half of it written by women, was consid ... (read more)