Overlooking Broadway

This is a view of the Broadway Tower, built as a "folly" -- an architectural ornament -- in the late 18th century.  It was used as a workshop by the writer/designer William Morris in the 19th century, and today is privately-held as a local museum and nature reserve.  The second photo is a view from the Cotswold Way, overlooking the village of Broadway.

My Lecture in Broadway

Despite the rainy afternoon, people came to the United Reformed Church yesterday to hear my talk about Mary Anderson and the small but very active colony of American artists who populated the village of Broadway in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Everyone in the village was kind and gracious to me.  This morning I went for a walk on part of the trail called the Cotswold Way, above the village, where I met some sheep, who were not at all interested in any lecture I might or might not deliver.

My Return to Broadway

Broadway, Worcestershire.  I was last here in 2000, to do some research on Mary Anderson de Navarro, an actress born in Louisville who had her stge debut at 17 in New York, and then became a sensation in London.  Known for her portrayals of Shakespearean heroines, she was a much-beloved figure on both sides of the Atlantic.  When I was here in 2000, I was privileged to visit her family home in this beautiful Cotswold village, and I stayed at a lovely bed-and-breakfast called the Olive Branch.  This afternoon I was welcomed back to the Olive Branch and tomorrow I am to give a program about Mary Anderson and the group of artists, American and British, who gathered around her.

Adventures on a Blustery Day

It's finally feeling like autumn.  Today Jane and I walked up to the neighborhood of Muswell Hill, passing a recently opened gift-and-tea shop that reminded me of my old shop Westminster Alley in North Carolina, except that we had no tea room and we had Vera Lynn playing rather than Gershwin.  But we had a lovely tea, and then Jane found a little "Let Me Write" notebook on whose cover was a picture of "Jane's Teashop" -- how could I not buy it?  Then we wandered through the shops and bought some groceries at Marks & Spencer, and stopped at the Bald-Faced Stag pub on the way home.

Speaking about the 1890s in an 1894 building . . .

Was thrilled to see the sign outside the Bishopsgate Institute that my lecture was sold out!  Wonderful Victorian building, of which I am given a tour by Lucy, who has corresponded with me for several months about my lecture.  The Institute has served as a learning and cultural center for over 100 years.  The halls are decorated with beautiful Art Nouveau tiles, and there is a gorgeous library being renovated.  The audience for my lecture is composed of men and women in a wide age span -- they ahve very good questions about social class and how professional opportunities varied for women of different backgrounds.  I was pleased with how the evening went -- but also know how I can tailor the next lecture to give more equitably-spaced attention to each of the women covered in my book.  More adventures in London tomorrow!

I'm in London!

So proud of myself -- I took the Underground from Heathrow airport into Central London.  My first destination was my publisher's representative on Henrietta Street in Covent Garden.  I get off at Leicester Square and without a map find my way to Henrietta Street, where I have been on numerous prveious occasion.  I am pleased that my memory has gotten me here!  After checking in with Andrew, my rep, I go for a walk to Cecil Court and show Mr Drummond the paragraph I wrote about him in my book.  In the evening I have a lovely visit with the American Women's Club at their headquarters in South Kensington.  They are very welcoming.  The current members have discovered decades-old archives of the AWC, which I did not see on my previous visit (at a different location) 20 years ago. They invite me to come back next week to examine the archives.  Then I take a taxi to Jane's flat and we have a happy reunion! 

Pausing While I Pack . . .

Over the past 20 years, I have been fortunate to travel to England a number of times -- have used the resources of the British Library, the Women's Library in London, and archives at the Imperial War Museum and the English-Speaking Union.  I have seen where Elizabeth Banks and Mary Anderson and others lived.  And I even found that elusive 1894 young woman's magazine, by pure serendipity, on a bookseller's display in Manchester!  So it's been more than research -- all right, it's obsessiveness.

And now I am going to have the chance to share my research, taking it back to England.  I am about to embark on a trip during which I am scheduled to give talks at the American Women's Club, the Bishopsgate Institute, and the Women's Library, all in London.  In addition I am scheduled to speak in the gorgeous village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds, where Mary Anderson lived for many years.  This is the culmination of a great deal of planning and I am very excited, especially about seeing people who helped me with my research so many years ago.  Stay tuned for updates!

Exciting Stops Along the Way . . .

Once I had my list of American expatriate women writers in England, I set to work on a project outline.  At this point I thought I might continue through the 20th century and so I placed ads in journals such as The Author and The London American, requesting responses from writers who might be interested in participating in my study.  I received quite a number of answers!  So with the help of a small grant from the Independent Scholars' Association of the North Carolina Triangle, I went to London to study archival materials at the British Library Newspaper Collection and at the Fawcett Library, which housed the largest collection of materials related to the history of women in Britain; it is now called The Women's Library.  I also planned to meet indiviudally with about twenty women who were kind enough to offer me an interview -- journalists, poets, biographers, novelists, and translators.   Eventually I had a tremendous amount of information, in fact too much for one book.  I decided to focus on the Victorian period and concentrated first on Elizabeth Banks.  Because there was so little written about her, writing her story presented a real challenge.  I had enough, though, for a paper which I presented at a conference of the Southeast Modern Language Association conference in Atlanta, after which I was approached by a publisher's rep, who wanted to know if I had a book in the works!  From this initial contact came two opportunities:  the University Press of Florida first offered to reissue Banks's The Remaking of An American, with my introductory essay, and then to publish my longer study.  I already had compelted several chapters, but that interview of Banks in the magazine for young women still eluded me.  I had found letters, old newspaper articles, obscure magazines -- but not that one!

Adventures in Research

Absolutely -- research is adventure!  I was now immersed in finding materials to substantiate the bits of information I was locating about individual writers.  I learned that one copy of one book by Elizabeth Banks was in our university library, her 1928 autobiography The Remaking of An American.  When I went to the circulation desk, I found that I was the first person to take it out.  Ever.  Poor neglected Elizabeth -- it was a great story, full of grit and daring.  Born in New Jersey, orphaned young, and growing up with an uncle and aunt on a Wisconsin farm, Elizabeth dreamed of a career as a reporter and writer.  But in the late 1880s the only assignments given to women involved fashion and society.  Bored with this, she told her editor in Baltimore that she wanted to pursue her career in London.  He laughed and told her she'd starve there.  So she booked passage to London, arriving with one suitcase and her pet dog, and rented a small flat.  Then she wrapped up the remainder of her money in a handkerchief, walked halfway across on of the bridges over the Thames, and tossed it in.  Now penniless, she would have to find work, and fast.

Great story -- but is it true?  And what of her story of exposing the way laundry workers were treated? Or how people could buy their way to introductions at Court?   Or later, how she agitated for women's suffrage in a conservative newspaper?  Although I found Elizabeth very likable in her writings, I needed to know more about her from sources other than herself.  From old copies of Who's Who and telephone directories in London I found records of her different addresses over the years; from offices in England I obtained copies of her will and death certificate.  And in the newspaper archives of the British Library I read through yellowed copies of newspapers nearly a century old -- originals, as these coies had never been put onto microfilm -- and followed her weekly column.  And then I found the actual buildings where she had lived.  One 18th-century house had been pulled down to make way for the Shell-Mex House in the late 1930s, and the last address at which she had lived seemed to have been destroyed in the Blitz, but I found two others, one in Kensington and the other in Hampstead.  As I followed each step of her professional journey she emerged from the shadows and became more real as a person.  Bit by bit over the years I located more articles she had written in various magazines.  But the one interview she had given in her lifetime, published in the 1890s in a magazine for young women, eluded me.  If libraries had this journal, they did not have this particular year.   I knew the interview existed, as it was listed in a directory of periodical literature of the 1890s.  But there was no printed copy listed int he archives of any library, anywhere.  It remained a tantalizing puzzle.

My idea takes hold . . .

Returning from a trip to visit my friends Miriam and Larry, on sabbatical in Oxford, I started playing around with a research idea that could justify a research trip to England for me.  My academic specialty, at this point, had been 19th century American literature.  Now, how was I going to link that to a UK-bound research project?  Ah:  "Nathaniel Hawthorne in Liverpool:  The Depressive Years."  No, I don't think so.  What about American expatriates writing in England?  They didn't all go to Paris.  But, musing there in my airplane seat, the only names I could come up with were Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.  And they'd been done -- no new lit crit needed on those guys.  No one else?  What about women writers?  Shari Benstock had just published Women of the Left Bank,  pretty much the definitive work on female writers in Paris.  But what of women, particularly Americans, in London?

When I got back to Chapel Hill I searched through catalogues and indices at the university library -- boys and girls, this was before the Internet!  There were no search engines or listserves to consult -- we had to dig and sift like archaeologists, cross-referencing in our heads.  It was like knowing a room was there, tucked away in a great house, and we had to approach by this hallway and that, and if you came to a dead end, you turned back and went another way.  Archaeologists and detectives, all of us.

I started by looking at critical works on American expatriate writers in England.  There they were again, over and over:  Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound.  No women.  Well, Amy Lowell on a short visit in the early 20th century.  No one else.  I was puzzled.  What could account for there being no information about American women writing in England towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th?  Maybe all the women did go to Paris!  Or perhaps they were there in London, writing, but they were all lousy writers and that's why no one has heard of them.  Or just maybe there were writers indeed, but for some reason they had become obscured, minimied, dismissed by the publishing and literary world.  Who controlled what got published anyway?  And who, over the years, decided what was Great Literature and what was minor league?  Puzzled and annoyed, I gave myself a deadline of six months to see if I could find some American women hidden away in literary London.

I dug around and came up with a few clues from the vast catalogue of the Library of Congress: the "American Girl" books by Elizabeth Banks.  A few other critical works gave me a couple of names of individuals, and reading their stories led me to others.  Within six months I had a very long list, and not just of writers.  I had actors, musicians, journalists, political activists -- quite an impressive array of women.

So I now had my battle plan for writing a book, and it took a long time.  Raising children, working full-time in a university administrative office, then consumed with the critical health issues of my parents . . . life in all its necessities and distractions.  But at night I would go down to my study and read some more, and write, and think.  Eventually I had enough information for a chapter, then two, then a paper.

Don't worry -- I am not going to tell you the entire story of my book or summarize its contents.  Then you won't buy a copy!

But I will tell you about some of the adventures the writing of the book brought me, and all the wonderful people I met along the way, and where the book is taking me now.  Come along!

Why am I doing this?

I suppose at some point I can go into all the reasons I have this deep affection for England and things English.  A natural outgrowth of a major in English literature?  A feeling of being "at home" the very first time I visited, right after college?  All those A.A. Milne books I read as a child (the real Pooh stories, not the Disneyfied pap, with the real illustrations, by Ernest Shepard). By the way, have you read Milne's poem "Disobedience"?  Absolutely terrifying -- and it's a poem for children!  Paddington Bear?  The Avengers?

Ah, but it probably goes back much further than that.  Let's blame Mom!  When I was small, my mother would try inventive ways to get me to drink my milk.  She would warm the milk, dissolve a spoon of honey in it, serve it in a cup and call it "English tea."  I was sold.

At any rate, I grew up as a little bookworm and my fondest hopes were to be teacher and to have a house or apartment with an entire wall covered in books.  I majored in English and went on to graduate school, taught, collected books . . . then took some time away from teaching English after my children were born.  My friend Miriam inspired me to act on a project I had been considering, and we and two other friends opened a small retail business in North Carolina.  When I bumped into one of my former high school students on the street and I mentioned having a small shop, he chuckled, "What kind of shop?  An English shop?"  Precisely.  We carried woollen scarves, travel guides, china teapots and mugs, tea cozies, antique prints, kilt pins, tea, preserves, Digestive biscuits, Marmite, Ribena, Ladybird books for children, toys and puzzles, tartan ties, Norfolk Lavender.  We had Thomas the Tank Engine before "Shining Time Station" popularized him on American TV!  Our customers, a number of whom were British transplants, advised us and requested additional items.  We developed a following.  Although we had a clever name -- "Westminster Alley," coined by Miriam -- many people referred to us simply as "the English shop."  We heard of a couple of Englishwomen, married to American military men, who drove up from Fayetteville, NC knowing only this term; they drove into town, rolled down their car windows, asked passers-by where "the English shop" was, and were sent right to us!

Running  a retail establishment was a terrific learning experience -- about the business world, about our community, about merchandising and marketing -- but the experience of the shop also solidified my Anglophilia.  I wasn't that interested in retail per se, and I did not want a jewelry shop or a clothing boutique or even a regular giftware store.  I wanted an English shop.  And we ran our business happily for a number of years, and were able to travel to trade fairs in the UK.

But I distract myself.  I am sure you are yearning to discover why I chose to write a book about American women in England in the 19th century, aren't you?  Patience.  More soon!

An American Girl in England

My girlhood years are long past -- and so were those of the writer who inspired the title of this blog, Elizabeth Banks. Elizabeth was a journalist at a time when just a few women were beginning to make inroads in the world of newspapers. Born in New Jersey and raised in Wisconsin Elizabeth was frustrated by the lack of opportunities women journalists had in the United States, and so she decided to take her skills to London, where she knew no one. That was in 1892. She created an identity for herself as "the American Girl," this phrase conveying both her outsider status and the optimism of youth. She continued to write as "the American Girl" for years, well into middle age, as a matter of fact.

Middle-aged myself, though don't pin me down to an exact number, I like to think that I have retained some sense of excitement in discovering new places, re-discovering old favorites, and meeting new people. I also admire people who are not afraid to be different and who can make bold decisions. In my life as a scholar and teacher, I have written about less popular, even unknown individuals because they fascinated me. I started with the Southern American poet Sidney Lanier. (Who? Look him up!) and then I discovered Elizabeth Banks and a number of other 19th-century American women who decided to pursue their lives and careers in England.

I spent ten years doing research and writing about them, and the result was a book published in 2006 by the University Press of Florida, titled American Women in Gilded Age London: Expatraites Rediscovered. Shortly I am traveling to England again, this time to speak about my book, and you can follow along via this blog.