Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff (eds). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: Volume 1, Early Manuscript Books

Abstract

The first volume of the long-awaited scholarly edition of The Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea represents a significant achievement for Jennifer Keith and her collaborators. For the last two decades, anyone interested in charting the extent of Finch’s writing has had to navigate their way between two different editorial projects: Myra Reynolds’ The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (1903), which contains Finch’s earlier works, and Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant’s edition of Finch’s later poems, The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems (1998). When the Cambridge University Press edition of the Works of Finch is complete, it will be possible, for the first time, to approach Finch’s whole career through the lens of a single, coherent editorial vision, one which foregrounds the circumstances of composition, collection and circulation; recognizes Finch as a dramatist as well as a poet; and documents, through scrupulously edited texts and precise textual and editorial notes, the occasions and complex materialities of Finch’s writing. Based on the evidence of this first volume, the Works will be a landmark edition in the study of women writers and a valuable contribution to the understanding of the literary and political cultures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.