“I long to know your Opinion of it”: The Serendipity of a Malfunctioning Timing Belt or The Guiney–Tutin Collaboration in the Recovery of Katherine Philips

Abstract

ABSTRACTLouise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) and John Ramsden Tutin (1855–1913) established the foundations for modern scholarship on Katherine Philips. Guiney inspired Tutin to publish the “Orinda Booklets”, including Philips's Selected Poems, published in two distinct editions in 1904 and 1905. Guiney's “Appreciatory Note” (1904) and Tutin's “Prefatory Note” (1905) contrast dramatically with George Saintsbury's determined yet cautiously apologetic “Introduction” to Philips in his Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (1905). Archival documents held at the University of Notre Dame and the College of the Holy Cross are the basis of this article's reconstruction of the collaboration between Guiney and Tutin as they pioneered Philips's recovery in the early twentieth century. The serendipity of a malfunction of the author's car's timing belt in 2007 led her to return to Holy Cross at a fortuitous time: a new set of Guiney's letters had just arrived, allowing the author to fill in the remaining gaps of the trajectory between Tutin's acquisition of the holograph of Philips's poems and his decision to sell the manuscript to the National Library of Wales.