Pamela Clemit

Clemit was born in Northumberland and educated at the Duchess's Grammar School, Alnwick. She took a first-class B.A. (Hons.) degree in English Language and Literature from Mansfield College, Oxford, from where she also holds an M. Phil. She took a D. Phil in English from St Hugh's College, Oxford.

She taught at Durham University from 1989 to 2015, where she was awarded a personal chair in the Department of English in 2005 and held a Christopherson/Knott Foundation Fellowship in 2012-13.[1] She is currently Professor in English at Queen Mary University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.[2][3] She was a member of the inaugural class of Fellows at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.[4] She has held Visiting Fellowships at, among other places, All Souls College, Oxford, and Wadham College, Oxford.

Clemit works on the two generations of writers and thinkers influenced by the French Revolution in Britain, with a particular focus on the anarchist political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836) and his associates. She is currently editing The Letters of William Godwin, which is being published in six volumes by Oxford University Press. Volume I: 1778-1797, for which she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship,[5] was published in 2011,[6] and Volume II: 1798-1805 in 2014.[7] In 2017 she led a collaborative project to digitise and make publicly available the sole surviving manuscripts of Godwin's principal works, Political Justice (1793) and Caleb Williams (1794), which are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Images of the manuscripts are available to view on The Shelley-Godwin Archive.[8] She is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and a contributor to Tom Hodgkinson's Idler magazine.[9]

She received the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016.[10][11] She is a Fellow of the English Association (2011),[12] and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2019).[13]

• ‘Botanical Networking: Four Holograph Letters from Charlotte Smith to James Edward Smith’ (with Brad Scott), Romanticism, 26: 1 (2020), 1-12.
• ‘The Signal of Regard: William Godwin’s Correspondence Networks’, European Romantic Review, 30: 4 (Aug. 2019), 1-14.
• ‘Letters and Journals’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 418-33.
• The Letters of William Godwin, Volume II: 1798-1805 (2014), ed. Pamela Clemit, in The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-).
• ‘Godwin’s Citations, 1783-2005: Highest Renown at the Pinnacle of Disfavor’ (with Avner Offer), Nineteenth-Century Prose, 41: 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2014), 27-52.
• The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I: 1778-1797 (2011), ed. Pamela Clemit, in The Letters of William Godwin, gen. ed. Pamela Clemit, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011-).
• The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• ‘Readers Respond to Godwin: Romantic Republicanism in Letters’, European Romantic Review, 20: 5 (Dec. 2009), 699-707.
• ‘Self-analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism, 11: 2 (Autumn 2005), 161-80.
• ‘William Godwin and James Watt’s Copying Machine: Wet-Transfer Copies in the Abinger Papers’, Bodleian Library Record, 18: 5 (Apr. 2005), 532-60.
• ‘Frankenstein and Matilda: The Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26-44.
• ‘Life of William Godwin’, Poems, Translations, Uncollected Prose, ed. Pamela Clemit and A. A. Markley, Volume IV of Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives and Other Writings, gen. ed. Nora Crook, 4 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002).
• William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker, Broadview Literary Texts (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001).
• ‘Two New Pamphlets by William Godwin: A Case of Computer-Assisted Authorship Attribution’ (with David Woolls), Studies in Bibliography, 54 (2001), 265-84.
• ‘From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley’s Changing Conception of her Novella’, Romanticism, 3: 2 (1997), 152-69.
• Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces & Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume II of Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996).
• Falkner: A Novel, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume VII of Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996).
• Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. Pamela Clemit, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996).
• William Godwin, St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
• The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Oxford English Monograph Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, reprinted, 2001).
• Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume V of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993).
• Early Novels, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume II of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).
• Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume III of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).
• St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume IV of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).
• Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume V of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).
• Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume VI of Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols., Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992).

• Queen Mary University of London departmental profile
• Wolfson College profile
• University of Oxford departmental profile
• Personal website
• Pamela Clemit on Twitter