This is my Master’s thesis. It demonstrates that, for British Romantic authors writing in the 1815 – 1820 period, autumn—with its frequently nebulous weather, its variated atmospheric aesthetics, and its cultural clout as the season of both fruitfulness and decay—was an apt aesthetico-temporal trope to represent the tempestuous climate—or spirit—of their age. I argue that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), and John Keats’s To Autumn (1820) depict autumn as the season of missed time: an interval during which Victor Frankenstein, Anne Elliot, and Keats’s speaker find themselves in states of melancholy suspension in time and space, which is generative, at worse, of paralyzing and alienating perplexity, and, at best, of alleviating and grounding sensoriality in the here-and-now. The autumnal aesthetics and temporality of the three texts, I suggest, represent Shelley’s, Austen’s, and Keats’s literary engagement with, and response to the temporality of acceleration and contingency, as well as the climate of elusiveness and uncertainty of the age 1815 – 1820.

My thesis was awarded the Marcel Compagnon Prize in the Western languages, literatures, and civilizations category in 2022.

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This article is the written and revised version of a paper I delivered on August 13, 2023 at the Wordsworth Summer Conference (August 7 - 17, 2023), held at Rydal Hall, Cumbria (UK).

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This is an essay that I wrote in 2020 for a Master’s class on the histories of the practice of reading texts across various periods and media.

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I wrote this essay for a Master’s class on Victorian poetry.

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I wrote this essay for a Master’s class on “unnatural” narratology in Native American texts.

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