Olivia Houseman, Newnham

Biographical Information

I completed my undergraduate degree in English at The University of St Andrews in 2022, graduating with the Samuel Rutherford Prize for the most distinguished work in English Literature, and continued at St Andrews as the Hargreaves Scholar for an MLitt in Romantic and Victorian Studies in 2022-23. 

I am in the first year of my PhD at Newnham College, funded by a Vice Chancellor's and Newnham College scholarship. My research investigates the work of women whose engagement with multiple art forms has been neglected by scholarship and the shifting relationship between literature and the visual arts in the long nineteenth century.

Research Interests

All aspects of the Gothic; representations of the 'madwoman' in Romantic & Victorian literature; painting, drawing, and the artist in literature; broadly - eighteenth and nineteenth-century women's writing.

Writers I have previously written on: Ann Radcliffe; Mary Shelley; Letitia Landon; Christina Rossetti; Emily, Anne, & Charlotte Brontë; Anne Bannerman; Lewis Caroll; Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Anne Lister.

Writers I am currently working on: Anna Laetitia Barbauld; Louisa Stuart Costello; Letitia Landon; the Pre-Raphaelites.