New Mexico State University Professor Produces Novel From a 200-Year-old Manuscript

Harriet Linkin, a professor of English at New Mexico State University, is the editor of Selena, a never before published 200-year-old manuscript by Irish poet Mary Tighe (1772-1810).

Some of Tighe’s poems were published by her family after her death but many of her poems and the novel Selena were not printed. “Her family published the poems that presented her as the most proper, spiritual, and religious person,” Linkin reports. “They left out poetry about passion.”

In 1996, Professor Linkin received a grant from New Mexico State University to travel to Dublin to conduct research on Tighe. There she found a 2,500-word manuscript written in Old English and containing words from six different languages. Professor Linkin spent six years transcribing and editing the manuscript to produce the novel that is being debuted this week by Ashgate Publishing.