Dear blog,

I’m just back from a four-day break in Berlin, which was absolutely brilliant. I went to lots of tiny, contemporary art galleries as well as some of the larger national ones. There is so much going on there and it was very exciting to get a glimpse of a such a vibrant cultural world.

I’ve been asked to do one of the Royal Society’s lunchtime talks in the autumn, which are mostly attended by members of the public rather than academics. The organizer is particularly interested in the material I’ve been writing about Mary Wollstonecraft so I think I will do something on that. I’m on sabbatical next semester, which I’m looking forward to very much, so will have more time to think about how to give a paper that is accessible and interesting to the public.

I’ve also negotiated a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan for the publication of my next monograph, ‘Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s’, which is brilliant. I enjoyed working with Palgrave Macmillan (and the Commissioning Editor, Paula Kennedy) very much for Shelley and Vitality and Teaching Romanticism. Now I just have to find the time to finally finish the book.

I’m working in the Portico today, a beautiful library, which has many of the books that I need for the chapter I’m writing on Davy at the moment. I’m currently grappling with his poem ‘Life’, which seems first to have been written in a notebook (now in the Royal Institution), was commented upon by Coleridge in a letter of 9 October 1800, and changed in consequence. John Davy published it in his Memoirs in 1836 under the title ‘Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’ (referring to Davy’s illness of 1808). Last year, though, I found another version, which Davy published anonymously in a collection edited by Joanna Baillie, called ‘Life’, in 1823. I’m going to look at these poems for evidence of something Davy called the most ‘sublime’ idea of all: that matter changes into other states and other forms.

All best,

Sharon