Modelling Mary Russell Mitford’s Networks

Abstract

This chapter features the Digital Mitford Archive’s work to construct a scholarly edition as a digital database. The chapter presents a view of the once popular and prolific Mary Russell Mitford as a writing node in a network of people and publications that shaped nineteenth-century literary and theatrical genres. The first half of the chapter applies distant reading methods to construct a model of Mitford’s correspondence network from extant records of over 2,000 letters held in public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter further investigates networks of reference within Mitford’s letters and writings from the 1820s encoded thus far in the Digital Mitford Archive, to explore which people and fictional characters Mitford discussed the most in years of career-defining productivity. The network analyses serve to highlight Mitford’s close relationships with male correspondents and her strong interest in female characters in the literature of her moment.