About the Lennox Bibliography Project

The Charlotte Lennox Bibliography Project is planned to be an open-source born-digital descriptive bibliography that focuses on the work of Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804). Charlotte Lennox was one of the most famous women authors of her day; she wrote poetry, novels, plays, and essays, translated works on political science and history, classical theater, and published a periodical specifically aimed at women. Her proto-feminist leanings are clear with her focus on women’s education, intelligence, self-sufficiency, and potential. While there has been a rediscovery of her work and resurgence of interest in her novels, the scope of her creative efforts and breadth of contemporary interest in her publications, whether as author or translator, has remained largely invisible. This project seeks to remedy that and provide a source for future scholars of Lennox’s publications.

This blog serves as the public-facing starting point for this project, which will be an ongoing concern completed in stages. The first step, Stage 1, is determining the location of extant copies of her work published between 1747-1850, when interest in reprinting Lennox’s work decreased significantly. Stage 2 will focus on both examining copies and building an archive from the data gained, as well as determining the parameters for the online interface. Stage 3 will focus on the collation and interpretation of that data. The goal is to continually add to and update the bibliography over time so that usable information is available as soon as possible, even if the whole of the data is not yet complete.

The author of this project, Michelle Lyons-McFarland, is currently a full-time lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, teaching professional and technical communication for engineers. She received her Ph.D. in 2018 from Case Western Reserve University, with research focuses in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Composition. In addition to teaching, Michelle is a tech editor for Digital Defoe, the online annual journal of The Defoe Society, and acted as a reviewer for the Year’s Work in English Studies from Oxford UP from 2019-2021.