The Trembling Hand

Powerful, revelatory... Mathelinda Nabugodi performs what she calls “an act of historical recovery,” re-examining British Romanticism’s beloved literary superstars through the debris they left behind... A masterpiece about how history is made, maintained, and remembered, while also including what history forgot — with trembling hands, she admits — and with power and ferocity

Boston Globe

Ambitious and ingenious, Mathelinda Nabugodi engages the reader both emotionally and intellectually in the quest to re-see, re-imagine and re-read the past. A voice sometimes tentative and searching, then sure of its scholarship, then puzzled by some large absence in the archive, then engrossed by a poem, an essay, a letter

Colm Tóibín, author of 'Long Island'

An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race

Kirkus Reviews

“I want to tell you the story of my encounter with these objects,” writes Mathelinda Nabugodi, entering the archive of the Romantic Epoch with a “trembling hand”. Here, artifacts are examined or touched with granular, decolonial precision. Grounded in profoundly somatic knowing, the reality of her own body as a participant in these encounters, Nabugodi has written an extraordinary memoir (or anti-memoir) at the intersection of race and literary time. I can’t recommend it enough

Bhanu Kapil, author of TS Eliot Prize winner 'How to Wash a Heart'

Mathelinda Nabugodi reveals the racial wounds behind the pristine face of British Romanticism. Her journey—part scholarly excavation, part personal pilgrimage—takes readers through abandoned archives and hallowed homes, where she confronts not just history but her own complex relationship with poets whose words shaped her life even as their era sought to erase people who looked like her… Nabugodi shows us how to hold two truths at once: beautiful craft and painful context, literary genius and racial violence. Her reckoning is a love letter written in disquiet, a map for those seeking the unvarnished truth of our literary inheritance, and a gift for anyone who values personal storytelling that illuminates our shared past

Professor DJ Lee, author of 'Slavery and the Romantic Imagination'

A viscerally bold, challenging and often uncomfortable study of our major British Romantic writers. Based on extensive archival research and highly sensitive to the lived experience of Black people, their real but often effaced or distorted presence in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, this study will redefine our understanding of British Romanticism and its troubled relationship to slavery and colonial for years to come

Peter Kitson, author of 'Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter'

The Trembling Hand offers a crucial corrective to the ways in which Romanticism has often been taught and positioned in British culture, confronting the aspects of Romanticism that have been hidden amidst the shared cultural project to make Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and the Shelleys into British national treasures. Nabugodi unearths new contexts for the study of Romanticism and also considers the ethical debates and dilemmas surrounding some of the most well-known poems in the period

Dr Amelia Worsley, co-editor of 'Romanticism, Abolition and Anti-Slavery Literatures'

With intellect, precision and empathy, Mathelinda Nabugodi speaks to the shadows hovering at the archive's edges, the presences that most have ignored. These presences are those Africans who travelled alongside Europeans, affecting – and creating – history. We needed Nabugodi’s courage in writing this history: Now, we do see and we do hear – and may the ancestors be pleased

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of 'The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois'

The Trembling Hand is erudite, discursive and enlightening, and I recommend it highly . . . Nabugodi’s absorbing work centres on the writers’ complicated relationship with slavery . . . wonderfully researched and deeply evocative . . . The Trembling Hand is the kind of detail-rich book I love to read

Lesley Krueger