The Letters of A. E. Housman

The Letters of A. E. Housman is a scholarly edition of over 2200 letters. (The previous edition, edited by Henry Maas, contained just over 880.) The letters cover the whole range of Housman's daily activities, whether he writes as poet, Professor of Latin, son, brother, uncle, friend, orcitizen. Thus they allow the fullest possible revelation of a man whose reserve was legendary. He emerges as a more amiable, more sociable, more generous, more painstaking, and more complex person than has previously been realized. In most cases the source of the text is a manuscript, and this hasresulted in a text that is more accurate and more complete than any previously available. Accompanying the text are notes covering persons and places, poetry, classical scholarship, publishing history, and literary allusion and echo.

Archie Burnett was born in Scotland in 1950 and studied at the University of Edinburgh before completing his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1977, with a thesis on Milton's language. He was Junior Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford 1974-8 then Lecturer and eventually Professor in English at Oxford Brookes University 1979-2000. He is currently Co-director of the Editorial Institute and Professor of English at Boston University.