Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Emeritus Professor John Batchelor

Emeritus Professor

Background

Email: john.batchelor@new.ox.ac.uk

Roles and Responsibilities

Member of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA); formerly an editor of The Modern Language Review and The Yearbook of English Studies (both publications of the MHRA).

Qualifications

M.A. Ph.D. (Cantab.), M.A. (New Brunswick)

Research

 

My work has been mainly in English literature since 1800. 

My books include a literary history, The Edwardian Novelists (1982), and monographs on H.G.Wells (1985) and Virginia Woolf (1991); and I was general editor for Oxford University Press of the World's Classics edition of Conrad (1980 - 2002). 

A good deal of my interest has been in biography. My first biography was of  the fantasist and illustrator Mervyn Peake (1974) and I edited a volume of essays (by a number of biographers) on The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford University Press, 1995). My more recent biographies include The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography  (Blackwell, 1994), John Ruskin: No Wealth but Life  (Chatto & Windus, 2000) and most recently a life of Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, who created the major Pre-Raphaelite decorative scheme at Wallington in Northumberland: Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Chatto & Windus, 2006). 

My new biography of Tennyson, entitled  Tennyson: to strive, to seek, to find, was published by Chatto & Windus, November 1 2012 and by Pegasus, New York, 2013. It is also available as an ebook, and in paperback from Random House (Vintage, 2014) and from Pegasus (2014).

I am now working on a new biography of Rudyard Kipling, and I am contributing to the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Literary Biography.


 

Esteem Indicators

Former Fellow of New College, Oxford; Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature, Newcastle University, 1990-2007 and visiting Professor at the University of Lancaster, 2000-2007; Founding Fellow of the English Association; formerly editor of Modern Language Review and The Yearbook of English Studies, 2004-2011, and currently an executive member of the MHRA which publishes those two journals.

Publications
  • Batchelor J. Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: Chatto and Windus, 2006.
  • Batchelor J. Alfred Tennyson: Problems of Biography. The Yearbook of English Studies 2006, 36(2), 78-95.
  • Batchelor J. Edwardian Literature. In: Bloom, H, ed. Edwardian to Georgian Fiction. New York: Chelsea House, 2005, pp.123-150.
  • Batchelor J. Scott, William Bell (1811–1890). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004. Available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/previous/24938/2004-09.
  • Batchelor J. Lord Jim at the Frontier. English 2007, 56(214), 29-39.
  • Batchelor JB. John Ruskin: no wealth but life: a biography. London: Pimlico, 2001.
  • Batchelor JB. Conrad and Wells at the End of the Century. The Critical Review, 38 1998.
  • Batchelor JB. Lord Jim à la frontière. in Lord Jim (original essays ed. and tr.Joseph Dobrinsky). Paris: Editions Autrement 1998.
  • Batchelor JB. Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E.A.J. Honigmann. (ed. with T. Cain and C. Lamont) Macmillan, 411pp 1997.
  • Batchelor JB. Ruskin and Shakespeare. Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E.A.J. Honigmann, ed. J. Batchelor, T. Cain and C. Lamont, Macmillan 1997.
  • Batchelor JB. The Art of Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 300pp 1995.
  • Batchelor JB. The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. Blackwell, 344pp (paperback 1996, published in translation into French, 1997 by Editions Autrement, Paris) 1994.
  • Batchelor JB. Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991.
  • Batchelor JB. Lord Jim. Unwin Critical Library Series, Unwin Hyman 1988.
  • Batchelor JB. Joseph Conrad's Victory. World's Classics, Oxford: OUP 1986.
  • Batchelor JB. H.G. Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 1985.
  • Batchelor JB. Lord Jim. (ed.) World's Classics, Oxford: OUP 1983.
  • Batchelor JB. The Edwardian Novelists. Duckworth 1982.
  • Batchelor JB. Mervyn Peake: a Biographical and Critical Exploration. Duckworth 1974.
  • Batchelor JB. Tennyson: To strive, to seek, to find. London: Chatto & Windus, 2012.