Crossings and Interconnections

In this special issue we honour the remarkable academic career and prolific scholarship of Barbara Wright (1935–2019) who significantly impacted the field of nineteenthcentury French studies. Her twenty-two books and ninety-five articles testify to her far-ranging academic interests and her authoritative command of interdisciplinarity. Her combination of a well-honed critical eye with a depth of historical knowledge provided a frame for a variety of studies on Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Moreau, Hector Berlioz, Marcel Proust, Edgar Quinet, Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville and Gustave Courbet, to name a few in the panorama of major figures whose works transformed the literary and visual landscape of nineteenth-century France. Her primary focus and most prolific work focused on the career of Eugène Fromentin. Her 1966 edition of his novel Dominique is considered definitive while the 1995 edition of his correspondence, running to some two and a half thousand pages, remains unsurpassed. Her 1987 edition of his paintings and drawings had to be expanded to two volumes in 2008 because of all the discoveries she had made in the meantime. Her highly praised critical biography of Fromentin ran to over 600 pages and was awarded the Prix Roger Bonniot by the Académie de Saintonge for its French translation. In recognition, the city of La Rochelle made her an honorary citizen and dedicated a pathway in her name (Figure 1). This special issue seeks, similarly, to honour a remarkable academic path-maker, on behalf of her immediate colleagues and former students at Trinity College Dublin (four former students of Trinity’s French Department are included in this volume), and on behalf of her extensive and intersecting circles of academic friends in French studies (some of whom contributed to Conroy and Gratton eds. 2005), particularly those associated with the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes and its North American counterpart, Nineteenth-Century French Studies. In her prologue to the issue, Claire Moran, writing as Wright’s former PhD student, highlights the qualities that distinguish preeminent role models and mentors who open doors to their fields and the people in them. The subsequent two articles, by Robert Lethbridge and Mary Orr respectively, turn to the painter and writer to whom Wright devoted the bulk of her career: Fromentin. The following four pieces, by Sarah Gubbins, Maria C. Scott, Michael Tilby and Therese Dolan, all share a more or less direct focus on Baudelaire, who was a major research and teaching interest of Wright’s. Elizabeth Geary Keohane’s article, like others in the volume, bears witness to Wright’s stimulating work on the visual arts, including her interest in word-image relations. Finally, Roger Little, as a longstanding Trinity colleague of