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!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
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!
Sunday, September 13, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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!
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!
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