Erotic Coleridge Women, Love and the Law Against Divorce [Hardcover]

Erotic Coleridge charts Coleridge's prolific creation of love poems from early flirtatious verse to poems about marital incompatibility, the blank faces of young women fearing for their reputations, the obliterating seductions of young women, the exaltation of falling in love, the spoken and sung voices of women, the pain of jealousy, and late meditations on how to live with the waning of love. In his prose he responds to Parliamentary debates about punishing adulteresses and gives advice about how marriage can warp the soul. In his sensual exuberance and his ethics of reverencing the individuality of other persons, Coleridge attends closely to the lives of women.Coleridge's Immersion in Women's Psychology First Loves and Early Flirtations The Smoking Torch of Hymen Blank Faces and the Fear of Ruin 'Christabel' and the Phantom Soul Sara Hutchinson: 'Love' and the Act of Reading Hearkening to Womanly Voices Divorce and the Law 'A Kite's Dinner' In Communities of Women: Developing as Persons

Erotic Coleridge is a book that vividly and abundantly documents a facet of Coleridge's career neglected by previous critics and biographers. - EuropeanRomantic Review This is a challenging, ambitious, and rewarding book.,,Her study is wide-ranging and draws on a variety of disciplines, encompassing biography, literary criticism, and social, cultural, and legal history. -The Coleridge Bulletin Anya Taylor succeeds like no scholar before her in tracing an illuminating path through the dark and tangled romantic chasm that was Coleridge's sex life. A consistently fascinating mixture of biography, cultural history and literary criticism, Erotic Coleridge is full of unexpected apercus, quiet wit and emotional wisdom. It is particularly valuable for the delicate tact with which it relates Coleridge's enlightened views about women to his confused practice as a fallible lover, errant husband and loyal friend. - Tim Fulford, Nottingham Trent University, England