Marilyn Butler (1937-2014) was a prominent scholar in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, a groundbreaking practitioner and theorist of the historicist criticism of literary texts, and pioneering scholarly editor of hitherto marginalized women writers. Her widely acclaimed publications include Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972), Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (1979), Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (1981), and seminal scholarly editions of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. She was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1986 to 1993, and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1993 to 2004. Mapping Mythologies, finished in 1984, but never hitherto published, is the first volume of a never-completed larger project on literary mythologies between 1730 and 1830.
