Professor Barbara Hardy - elected as a Senior Fellow
Professor of English Literature Emeritus, University of London

Year elected: 2006

Her influential career spans fifty years, during which she has written predominantly on the nineteenth century novel, particularly on George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, W M Thackeray and Henry James. She has also written with imaginative insight on poets ranging from Shakespeare to Clough, Tennyson to Dylan Thomas, Hopkins to Plath. She has been a pioneer in investigating the relations between the formal properties of fiction and their emotional affect in the reader.