Marilyn Butler (Marilyn Speers Butler) Biography

British scholar and critic, born in Kingston-upon-Thames, London, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. In 1986 she became King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. Her reputation as a specialist in the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was established with Maria Edgeworth (1972), the fullest available biography of that author; Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Peacock Displayed (1979), and Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1981) are notable for their detailed examination of the social, cultural, and political climates of the period. Throughout much of the 1980s she was occupied with Janet Todd in editing the seven volumes of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1989); Butler's other works of editorship include Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (1984), an anthology of political writings, and a new edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), based on the original 1818 text.