Professor Rosemary Ashton FBA

Rosemary Ashton is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL and an Honorary Fellow of UCL.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was awarded an OBE in 1999 for services to comparative literature.  Her research area is 19th-century literary, intellectual, and cultural history. She is the author of four critical biographies: George Henry Lewes (1991), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1996), George Eliot (1996), and Thomas and Jane Carlyle (2002).  Two of her books belong to the field of Anglo-German relations: The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 (1980) and Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (1986).

Three books on Victorian culture followed: 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006); Victorian Bloomsbury (2012), which resulted from a larger research project directed by Professor Ashton between 2008 and 2011, the Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project, which details the founding of innovative educational and medical institutions in Bloomsbury from 1800 to 1904; and One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858 (2017). She has made frequent contributions to radio, especially Radio 4's In Our Time (on Romanticism, Wordsworth, the Faust legend, Anglo-Germanism in the 19th century, Dickens, and George Eliot – most recently on Middlemarch, 2018), and has participated in television programmes on George Eliot for BBC2 and BBC4.  She is involved in planning and contributing to a number of events to take place in 2019 to celebrate the bicentenary of George Eliot's birth.