Amelia Opie’s works were well-received by her contemporary audiences, yet few critical studies of her work exist. Shelley King and John B. Pierce’s The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie is the first scholarly anthology of Opie’s poems. King and Pierce draw upon a variety of sources—archival records, published texts, primary and secondary sources—to represent the cultural and commercial complexities of Opie’s 60 years as a poet.What King and Pierce did not have access to in assembling The Collected Poems is Opie’s Cromer notebook. Housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, this document contains over 300 pages of dense composition and revision. Opie began the notebook during her stay in Cromer and likely kept it from 1791 to 1807. The notebook consists mainly of drafts of poems, many of which were published. These drafts are earlier, if not the earliest, versions of these poems.Because the notebook spans a significant portion of Opie’s career, it presents a unique opportunity to reconstruct Opie as a writer. Writing research, combining psychology, linguistics, and education, promotes great innovation in re-imagining the compositional processes of authors. I will use this research to help me to understand how Opie cognitively appraised and re-appraised her writing, producing a poetics of revision.
Jirasek, Jan E. An Atlas of the Human Embryo and Fetus. A Photographic Review of Human Prenatal Development. The Encyclopedia of Visual Medicine Series. New York and London: The Parthenon Publishing Group, 2001:1–144.