Volume Two of The Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, now available

The second volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, co-edited by WFU Professor Claudia Kairoff and UNCG Professor Jennifer Keith, has been released in the US, marking the successful close of a complex seventeen-year project to assemble the first complete, standard critical edition of Finch’s printed works and manuscripts. 

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), was a celebrated and published poet in her own time, but, as Dr. Kairoff explained to Wake Forest News in 2010, “aside from incomplete editions, her work has never received the full critical attention necessary to establish the definitive texts, with thorough introductions, annotations and appendices, of her poems and plays. Standard critical editions are the first places to which scholars turn when researching and writing about important literary figures, so our Finch edition will provide a resource that 18th-century scholars, poetry scholars, feminists, and many others have long wished for.”

The first volume of The Works of Anne Finch provides established texts of Finch’s early manuscript books, including Poems on Several Subjects and Miscellany Poems with Two Plays written under Finch’s pen name, Ardelia. The second volume provides established texts of Finch’s later collections in print and manuscript form, Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (1713) and The Wellesley Manuscript, as well as uncollected poems and letters. 

The two-volume set is available from Cambridge University Press. 

---

About the Editors:

Jennifer Keith is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she has taught since 1997. She is the author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (2005) and numerous essays on poetry from the Restoration to the Romantic era. With the staff of the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she developed The Anne Finch Digital Archive, an open-access site that supplements this edition. Keith is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Claudia Thomas Kairoff is Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where she has taught since 1986. She is the author of Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (1994) and Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (2012), and co-editor, with Catherine Ingrassia, of ‘More Solid Learning’: New Critical Perspectives on Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (2000). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on Pope and on women poets. She is a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Keith and Kairoff were supported generously by their respective institutions, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Wake Forest University. They were awarded a long-term fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library for work on this edition. Keith also received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant for this critical edition and the digital archive.