Women Historians and Acknowledgments: Scholarly Collaboration as Expression of Authorial Self in Alice Stopford Green’s Histories, c. 1880–1916

Abstract

ABSTRACT Making historical knowledge is a social practice, and disciplinary etiquette encouraged Victorian historians to acknowledge their collaborators in publications. This essay argues that acknowledgments were not merely expressions of scholarly politeness but also crucial for historians’ self-fashioning. The meanings ascribed to the acknowledged names served as clues about a historian’s competence, methodological preferences, interpretative outlooks and cultural and ideological views, all of which constituted her scholarly self. The essay addresses the link between acknowledgments and self-fashioning by exploring how Anglo-Irish historian Alice Stopford Green (1847–1929) used the names of her collaborators to forge and express her competing and shifting scholarly selves. While her acknowledgments are reflections of her authorial selves, they also convey the impact that scholarly, gendered and ideological factors had on women’s historical endeavours and collaboration at the time.