A Newcastle Novelist, feat. Tricia Monsour

On the WPHP, our encounters with books and the women who worked on them are bibliographically-focused, as they must be for a project of this scale—focused attention on the contents of every work and the stories of their producers simply isn’t possible. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to engage with the works that closely—the opposite is true, in fact!—and for Episode 4 of Season 5 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “A Newcastle Novelist”, we were delighted to interview Dr. Tricia Monsour from the University of Saskatchewan about her dissertation project, a scholarly edition of a forgotten novel by a forgotten woman author, The Castle of Tynemouth (1806) by Jane Harvey, which does just that.

Rigorous attention to the intellectual, personal, and geographical contexts of the novel and its publication shapes Dr. Monsour’s encounter with this work in particular, and her understanding of Harvey more generally. In this interview, she emphasizes Harvey’s attention to space, place, and genre, and the personal contexts that data in a WPHP record cannot fully capture, familiarizing us and our listeners with this Newcastle novelist.

Guests

Tricia Monsour is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, whose dissertation took the form of a scholarly edition of the early nineteenth-century novel The Castle of Tynemouth (1806).