Ashley Tauchert is currently Head of the English Department in the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter. She established the 'Institute for Feminist Theory and Research' with Gillian Howie in 1998, which hosted the international Third Wave Feminism conference at Exeter in 2001. She coordinates the 'Eighteenth-Century Narrative Project' and acts as Associate Editor for Critical Quarterly. She has come to enjoy a relatively quiet, reflective life in Devon.