Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb
Just
before she started writing novels, the Victorian author George Eliot
wrote: “I have never before longed so much to know the names of
things…The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly
growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the
daylight of distinct, vivid ideas.” This quotation identifies
something important about the study of literature—the way it helps
us name our world. Eliot had just returned from a visit to the
seaside, a visit she spent identifying seaweed and anemones and also
preparing to write some of the most important novels of the
nineteenth century. I try to follow Eliot’s example, not in
writing eight-hundred-page novels, but in my concern both for words
and for the natural world.
My teaching interests center on writers from the Victorian period of English literature (like George Eliot, Charlotte Bront�, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins) and my research has focused on how they respond to the dramatic ecological changes precipitated by the industrial revolution. I have also become fascinated by the life and writings of the eighteenth-century English natural historian and clergyman Gilbert White, who spent his adult life observing the plants and animals in his garden and parish. White is interesting because of his ecological approach to the world around him—he not only identified birds, plants, and insects, but observed how they behaved and how they interacted with other species. He also wrote beautifully. I’ve published an article about the many nineteenth-century editions of his book, The Natural History of Selborne, and I’m currently transcribing his sermons from manuscripts held by at Harvard University.
Since I finished my doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2005 and started teaching at Houghton, I’ve taught a variety of writing and literature courses including Victorian Literature and Culture and a Special Topics course—Seductive Fictions: the Rise and Development of the English Novel.
In my own garden and parish, I enjoy growing lots of vegetables and herbs, teaching my children, Josephine and Ernest, to identify the birds that come to our feeder, and talking about books with my husband, Ben (who teaches Philosophy at Houghton).
