Ratcliffe, Dr Sophie

Job Title: Career Development Fellow and Tutor in English
College: Christ Church
Period/ Subject: 1800-present

Email address: sophie.ratcliffe@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My major research interests are in the nineteenth century, and I am currently working on a monograph about conscience and nineteenth century thought. Specific author interests include Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Arthur Hugh Clough and Anthony Trollope. I also have an interest in the relationship between literature and technology in the nineteenth century, and the medical humanities in the Victorian period. 

‘The common conscience’ in the nineteenth century

 In 1836, a critic for the Christian Review, asked the question ‘is conscience universal?’ By the end of the century, the subject of the question appeared to be evaporating fast: a writer in a 1900 issue of the Daily Chronicle claimed, on the matter of conscience, ‘not to happen to have such a thing’. Grounding itself in debates between philosophers such as T.H Green and Henry Sidgwick, and reaching back to the work of Butler and Spinoza, my research explores ideas of conscience in mid-nineteenth century writing, ranging from the ‘bare conscience’ in Clough’s Dipsychus to Eliot’s ‘consciences not all of the same pattern’ in Daniel Deronda. My project has a particular focus on way in which, for Victorian writers, the material text impinges upon this matter of conscience. I show the extent to which writers model certain visions of morality, testing and strengthening the readers’ memories through narrative, visual and acoustic effects. I also examine the ways in which Victorian texts act as a testing ground for authorial conscience – the meeting point between contingent necessity and the putatively more permanent sense of artistic integrity. Authors discussed will include Hopkins, Browning, Clough, Eliot, Collins and Trollope. I am currently working on three sections of this monograph – a chapter concerning Browning’s search for what he terms our ‘common conscience’, a chapter about deafness and ideas of conscience, and a chapter about the idea of conscience, editing, and permanence in the work of Trollope. 

My research also extends into the twentieth and twenty-first century - in particular, the work of T. S. Eliot; James Joyce; Samuel Beckett; W. H. Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; Geoffrey Hill and the contemporary novel.

Recent Publications:

On Sympathy (2008)  - an examination of the idea of sympathy in authors including George Eliot, Robert Browning, W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett. 

'On Being a Man of the World': Geoffrey Hill and Physicality' in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his later work (forthcoming, 2012)

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