Professor Margaret Reynolds, MA (Oxford) PhD (London)
Professor

Margaret Reynolds works on literature from the eighteenth century to the present day, especially poetry and especially the Victorian period. In The Sappho History (2003), she traced the transmission of the works and images of the ancient Greek poet as they appear in the works of Mary Robinson, ST Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Baudelaire, Swinburne, H.D., and Virginia Woolf. The Sappho Companion (2000) is an anthology of Sappho and Sappho-related writings. Her work on late-modern representations of the Classics also includes her essays on the operas derived from adaptations of the Medea of Euripedes and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Her interest in contemporary literature also appears in her series (with Jonathan Noakes) Vintage Living Texts. This currently includes 14 titles on authors ranging from Margaret Atwood to Salman Rushdie.

She is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Adventures in Poetry, now in its 12th series. She broadcasts on music (especially opera) and poetry for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and for television channels BBC 2 and BBC 4. She writes and presents regularly for Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the English National Opera. She has a weekly column on classic books in the Times on Saturday. In May 2005 she gave the British Academy's Warton Lecture in English Poetry on 'The Child in Poetry: Lostlings, Foundlings and Changelings'.

Research interests:

• C18-21 literature
• Poetry
• Transmission of Classics
• Imagination of adoption

Postgraduate supervision:

Peggy would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of her research.

She has recently supervised the following successful PhD projects:

• Sinead O’Neill, 'A History of Opera in Performance: Verdi’s Macbeth at Glyndebourne, 1938 to 2007' (2010)

Publications:

Notable Publications:

ed., George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 2008)

The Sappho History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003)

Vintage Living Texts: The Essential Guide (with Jonathan Noakes),14 titles: Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle, Susan Hill, Sebastian Faulks, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson, American Fiction, Martin Amis, Louis de Bernieres, John Fowles (London: Vintage, 2002-)

The Sappho Companion (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000)

with Angela Leighton, eds, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)

See also Margaret Reynolds's Queen Mary Research Publications profile.

Undergraduate teaching:

In the current academic year, Peggy contributes to undergraduate teaching on:

• ESH227: Text, Art, and Performance in London
• ESH274: Writing Now
• ESH382: Reading Childhood/Writing Children