Must Anonymous Be A Woman? Gender and Discoverability in the Archives

Abstract

Must Anonymous Be A Woman?Gender and Discoverability in the Archives Emily C. Friedman (bio) anonymity, Virginia Woolf, manuscript fiction, manuscript culture, novel, archives, provenance, controlled vocabulary, women's writing, women's and gender studies The Case of "Hampshire, England women's novel, [17—]" Duke University's Rubenstein Library acquired a manuscript from Sotheby's in 1971. Initially catalogued as "Anonymous novel, 18th century," it was later changed to "Hampshire, England woman's novel, [17—]" and described as a manuscript of an unpublished epistolary novel bearing some resemblance to the works of Jane Austen. The volume is accompanied by six pages of type-written notes discussing Austen's possible connection with the unknown female author of this novel.1 The Sotheby's catalogue description of item 611, "Eighteenth-Century Epistolary Novel," dated the work at "c. 1780" and argued, "There is considerable evidence to suggest that this apparently un-published novel was written by a Hampshire novelist belonging to the generation before Jane Austen's," noting "detailed parallels exist between place and character names in the novel and those in the Austen circle."2 Sotheby's "considerable evidence," as I have shown elsewhere, was based on six pages of speculation by the work's last private owner, Brent Gration-Maxfield, who believed it was written by a relative of Austen's.3 Those typewritten notes are a misleading mix of wish-fulfillment and presumption. An elementary search of Google Books reveals that every element of the novel's description is entirely incorrect or unsubstantiated. First, it was published; The History of Nancy Pelham appeared serially in The London Magazine and The Hibernian between 1777 and 1779. The novel, far from being "like Jane Austen," is in fact a reimagining of Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded.4 It is only Austenian in style in that Austen's "knowledge of Richardson's works was such as no one is likely again to acquire" and much of her juvenilia was epistolary.5 While it is possible the novel was written by a Hampshire resident, the editor of The London Magazine wrote to "our worthy correspondent Curiosus" that "all the information the publisher is able to give respecting the history of Nancy Pelham" is that "it was written by an American lady, but he never knew either her name or rank in life."6 The novel is signed by "Arpasia," [End Page 359] a pseudonym that appears periodically in the eighteenth-century: a viable catalogue entry for an authorial name but not proof of a female-identified author. Moreover, the partial manuscript copy now held by Duke University is likely not by Arpasia, whoever that pseudonym may be tied to, because it was produced decades after the novel's publication.7 The manuscript yields few clues, beginning without title page or prefatory material and having no conclusion. The two copyists' handwriting is not markedly gendered.8 What does it mean to call it "Hampshire, England woman's novel," attaching the subject headings "Austen, Jane, 1775-1817—Style" and "Women authors, English—18th century," considering what is known about this manuscript? 9 What interpretations does such description foster—and forestall? I face these questions from two perspectives: as a researcher using the catalogue records to understand the object, and as the creator of a database, Manuscript Fiction in the Age of Print, 1750-1900.10 With the database, I am trying to create a taxonomy of an oft-overlooked form of literary production: manuscript fiction created during the age of print (1750-1900), unpublished in its authors' lifetimes. As an unruly user of catalogues and finding aids, I early on learned that existing descriptive systems do not have language to describe what I sought. I read of more profound struggles to overcome archival silences in the work of Saidiya Hartman and Marisa Fuentes and of a model for generative data creation when working with archival traces in Imtiaz Habib's Black Lives in the English Archives.11 To understand how these silences occurred, I looked to archival studies, heeding the call of Bridget Whearty and Michelle Caswell to attend to the scholarship of archivists rather than Jacques Derrida's abstracted concept...