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.