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Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
by Mathelinda Nabugodi
A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets—with urgent lessons for today.
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair. Percy Shelley's gilded baby rattle. The death mask preserving Keats's calm face. Byron's silk-lined leather boot. Who would have known there could be vast worlds contained in these items? In a completely new interpretation of the Romantics and their context, Whiting Award–winning scholar and literary sleuth Mathelinda Nabugodi uses these items to frame her interrogation of the poets, leading us on an expansive journey through time and memory, situating us in depth of their world, and her own.
"Freedom, liberty, autonomy are the period's favorite words," Nabugodi writes. Romantic poets sought truth in the depth of their souls and in the mind's unbounded regions. Ideals of free speech and human rights were being forged. And yet the period was defined by a relentless commitment to the displacement and stolen labor of millions. Romanticism, she argues, can no longer be discussed without the racial violence with which it was complicit. Still, rather than using this idea to rehash Black pain and subjugation, she mines the archives for instances of resistance, beauty, and joy.
Nabugodi moves effortlessly between the past and present. She takes us into the physical archives, and, with startling clarity, unpacks her relationships with them: what they are and should be; who built them; how they are entwined with an industry that was the antithesis of freedom; and how she feels holding the materials needed to write this book, as a someone whose ancestry is largely absent from their ledgers.
The Trembling Hand presents a dazzling new way of reading the past. This transfixing, evocative book reframes not only the lives of the legendary Romantics, but also their poetry and the very era in which they lived. It is a reckoning with art, archives, and academia bound to echo through the conversation for a long time to come.
"In search of lost Black lives. Literary scholar Nabugodi melds memoir and deep archival research to investigate six prominent writers..Each of the figures she investigates, she discovers to her dismay, sorrow, and anger, was intricately embedded in the slave economy. An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Ambitious and ingenious. Mathelinda Nabugodi's voice is sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter. The Trembling Hand engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
"With intellect, precision, and empathy, Mathelinda Nabugodi speaks to the shadows hovering at the archive's edges, the presences that most have ignored. There are whispers: 'See us. Hear us.' These presences are those Africans who traveled alongside Europeans, affecting—and creating—history. We needed Nabugodi's courage in writing this history: Now, we do see and we do hear—and may the ancestors be pleased." —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois
This information about The Trembling Hand was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she researches the literary archive of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is one of the editors of The Poems of Shelley and has published articles on his poetry and translations as well as on the work of Walter Benjamin. She is the first person to be awarded a Ph.D. in Creative Critical Writing from University College London.
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