Designing an Epistolary Corpus of Victorian Women Writers' Letters: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

This article describes a database corpus of approximately 2,000 letters written by or to nineteenth-century women writers in the period from 1820 to 1870. Almost all the letters are unpublished and have been transcribed from manuscripts in archives across Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Around twenty-five women writers are represented including well-known figures such as Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Mary Russell Mitford, Fanny Kemble, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. We discuss in particular the question of a design for the corpus that would render it suitable for both literary and linguistic research. Linguists and literary scholars, generally speaking, come at language from opposite directions: linguists from the word and phrase level up to text or discourse level, literary scholars from the text level down to the word and phrase level. They meet each other somewhere in the fluid regions of discourse analysis, literary stylistics, and genre typology and taxonomy. The corpus is described here from a linguistic perspective and from a literary point of view.