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!