Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame

In this revelatory and delightful study, University of Toronto professor emerita Jackson (Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia) explores why a handful of authors from the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, and Blake) achieved lasting fame while well-known contemporaries of theirs (including Robert Southey, Mary Brunton, Leigh Hunt, and Robert Bloomfield) did not. To set the stage, Jackson reviews classic texts by Cicero, Horace, Samuel Johnson, and others for the most influential ideas about fame in ancient times and in the generation preceding the Romantics. She also highlights the potentially fleeting nature of popularity; the question of merit and the relatively small role it plays in the process of recognition; and the mechanisms for making a previously unknown author’s reputation, using William Blake, nearly unknown in his own time, as a test case. Jackson persuasively shows that the legacies of even the most gifted authors rest on factors largely extraneous to the actual works, including later advocacy, being suitable for multiple audiences, symbolic value, and being selected for biographies, anthologies, and translations. In this reading, Keats, for instance, ultimately outstripped his rivals in part by dying young. Thoroughly researched, dense, and judicious, Jackson’s study should renew interest in the Romantic period and its writers—the famous and forgotten alike. [em](Mar.) [/em]