In eighteenth-century England, while famous writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathon Swift were making a living through their published works, a small but growing number of women also started to live by their pens. However, because of the way women were perceived in the public sphere, they were not able to write about themselves in the way men did. In 2017, Professor Christine Gerrard gave the keynote address at the BAKEA conference in Turkey entitled ‘Memory and the Eighteenth-century Female Poet’. In this talk she discussed the difference between memory as expressed by male and female poets of this period, and this sparked an interest in women and memory that Professor Gerrard has been pursuing ever since.

In this episode, Flora Symington, second year English student at Somerville College, will be interviewing Professor Gerrard, Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, about her work in this area.