The Writers of Wales Database

WILCOX, HELEN

Helen Wilcox is a Professor of English at Bangor University. Born in Nottingham in 1955, she was educated at Birmingham and Oxford Universities, and lectured at the University of Liverpool in the 1980s before moving to the Netherlands to take up the chair of English Literature at the University in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, where she and her family lived for 15 years. She moved back to the U.K. to a new chair at Bangor University in 2006, and enjoys living, working and writing in North Wales. She and her husband live in Nant Peris at the foot of Snowdon.

Helen teaches Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, contemporary writing (especially recent prize-winning texts and issues of literary taste) and interdisciplinary courses which cross the boundaries between literature and music, theology and the visual arts. Her research concentrates on three main areas of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature: devotional writing, particularly lyric poetry; Shakespeare, particularly the tragicomedies; and women’s writing, particularly poetry and autobiography.

Helen has published a dozen books and over a hundred articles and chapters, many of them focusing on the work of devotional writers such as John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, An Collins, Henry Vaughan, ‘Eliza’ and their contemporaries in the mid-seventeenth century. Her Shakespeare studies centre on his tragicomedies and the romances, having published several essays in the field of gender and genre in Shakespeare. Helen also has a long-standing interest in early modern women’s writing. She has published widely on sixteenth and seventeenth-century women authors, raising questions of identity, voice, wit and religion.

Helen’s most recent major publication, the definitive scholarly edition of George Herbert’s poems, has been described as "a superb guide to Herbert’s monumental art", fusing "empathetic humanity and intellectual rigour" (Journal of British Studies). According to the Contemporary Review, "Professor Wilcox and Cambridge [University Press] are to be congratulated on having produced a superb piece of scholarship that is also inviting to those outside academia". 

Helen is co-editor of English, the journal of the English Association, and joint leader of the research group ‘Women and the Sacred’ in the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She is on the International advisory council of the Renaissance English Text Society, and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association. She travels extensively to present her research, and has been a visiting professor at universities in Singapore and Spain.

Selected Publications:
Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (Routledge, 1989)
Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts (Macmillan, 2000)
The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (Arden Shakespeare, forthcoming 2010)

Contributed to:
Images of Belief in Literature (contributor) (Macmillan, 1984)
Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert (contributor) (Peter Laing, 1987)
Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (contributor and co-editor) (Manchester University Press, 1989)
Literature and the English Civil War (contributor) (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (contributor) (University of Missouri Press, 1994)
Reclamations of Shakespeare (contributor) (Rodopi/DQR Studies in Literature, 1994)
George Herbert: Sacred and Profane (contributor and co-editor) (Free University Press, 1995)
The Wit of Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (contributor) (University of Missouri Press, 1995)
Writing and the English Renaissance (contributor) (Longmans, 1996)
Interpretations of Paradise (Brill, 1999)
This Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (contributor) (Macmillan, 2000)
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (contributor) (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
In Arden: Editing Shakespeare (contributor) (Thompson/Arden Shakespeare, 2003)
Challenging Humanism (contributor) (University of Delaware Press, 2005)
Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices (contributor) (University of Michigan Press, 2006)
Transforming Holiness: Representations of Holiness in English and American Literary Texts (contributor and co-editor) (Peeters, 2006)
The Cambridge Companion to Donne (contributor) (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
A History of Feminist Literary Criticism (contributor) (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays (contributor) (Routledge, 2007)
The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (contributor) (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Shakespeare and War (contributor) (Ashgate, 2008)
Community-Making and Cultural Memory: Literature and Religion in the British Isles, 1558-1660 (contributor) (Ashgate, 2009)