Susan Carlile (ENGL) Writes Critical Biography on Charlotte Lennox

Susan Carlile of the Department of English returned to campus summer 2012 after a year in the United Kingdom as part of her National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) research fellowship to write a critical biography titled Charlotte Lennox: A Powerful Mind. “My hope is that this critical biography will show Lennox’s powerful mind as a woman author who succeeded in publishing in a wide range of genres, long before Jane Austen, and managed to maintain her reputation in the process,” Carlile said.

Carlile has been studying Lennox since writing her master’s thesis in 1995. She received her B.A. from Taylor University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from Arizona State University. She published her most recent book Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s with Lehigh University Press in 2010, and a modern edition of Lennox’s novel Henrietta with the University Press of Kentucky in 2008.

Carlile thanks the Department of English and the College of Liberal Arts for their support. “I recognize that it can be hard on the department when a faculty member is not there for a year,” she said. “But they’ve been very supportive about this project. Anybody who writes knows it takes a lot of time and doesn’t come out fully formed. It is a process of a 1,000 revisions. That is why writing is exhausting. Anyone who writes knows you have got to find uninterrupted time.”

Click here to read the full article from Inside CSULB.

Photo courtesy of Susan Carlile