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This article considers the impact of the digital turn on feminist efforts to restore value to women's literature of past centuries, and positions the Digital Mitford project as a next step in site-specific excavation following the large-scale surveys of women writers of the Orlando Project and the Women Writers Project. The Digital Mitford departs from these earlier projects by concentrating on an influential and prolific yet non-canonical woman writer who would otherwise garner only passing selective treatment in digital survey work. The very problem of Mary Russell Mitford's literary success over multiple decades and genres has led to a faulty collective memory of her that is fragmented along Romantic vs. Victorian period boundaries in literary studies. To redress this memory loss, the Digital Mitford team has initiated a network analysis study drawn from its TEI XML markup to call attention to the literary and historical figures together with the publications Mitford wrote about frequently in t...

Although poems about pregnancy by women are relatively rare during the British Romantic period, they are nevertheless significant objects of study because they differ markedly from pregnancy poems ...

Although Napoleon Bonaparte and Cola di Rienzi were both figures that occupied the imaginations of Romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and William Hazlitt, Mary Russell Mitford, in her play Rienzi (1828), is the first author to point out the similarities in both their biographical trajectories and their relationship to (and corruption of) the language of liberty. Engaging with the rudiments of John Horne Tooke’s early speech‐act theory, Mitford demonstrates the ability of language to transform reality. In Rienzi, however, speech acts have the ability to become oppressive when only one person is allowed to speak; thus Mitford demonstrates how necessary it is for a variety of voices – and women’s voices in particular – to be heard. In an age when plays were subjected to the censorship of the Examiner of Plays, Mitford, having herself suffered under these censorship laws, makes a compelling case against the oppressive censorship of the Licensing Act.