Epistolary Archive Research Articles

A Feminist Autoethnography of a Family Archive: Affects, Narratives and Practices During Two World Crises: World War II and Covid-19

What happens when we, as researchers, are living through a world crisis such as Covid-19, whilst studying a family epistolary archive produced during World War Two, another world crisis? What epistemological and methodological bridges can be made between the personal experiences of two women (great aunt and great niece) living in two moments of history but who are connected by the process of writing and reading epistolary documents? By conducting a feminist autoethnography of my experience in the Covd-19 pandemic, I reflect upon what it has meant to do feminist historic and archival research of the experience of Trixie Mayer, the first Mexican volunteer to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Great Britain from 1942 to 1946 and who produced more than 200 personal documents during her war work and afterwards kept them, together with the documents she received form her family in Mexico, for more than 70 years. I analyse how living through a pandemic has helped me understand my great aunt’s crisis experiences from a different perspective, questions, partialities and, at the same time, how these personal and familiar writings have helped me understand and question our current reality and PhD thesis from an alternative perspective.

N.A. Berdyaev’s Epistolary Archive: The Persona of the Philosopher in Intellectual History (Reflections on Book)

N.A. Berdyaev’s Epistolary Archive: The Persona of the Philosopher in Intellectual History (Reflections on Book)

‘A Strong Wish for Wings’: The Epistolary Relationship and Intellectual Collaboration between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë

This article disinters the impact of the correspondence between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë on their respective intellectual lives and writing. Supplementing the epistolary archive, textual evidence from Shirley (1849) and Miss Miles (1890) demonstrates the powerful collaborative dynamic between the two writers, which not only affected their work but also helped them to cultivate a sense of literary legitimacy in a publishing context habitually hostile to women’s voices. Brontë and Taylor’s letters indicate the explicit influence of one another’s thinking upon their writing, and suggest that the writers shared a sense of belonging to an intellectual partnership through their sustained correspondence. Simon-Martin’s theory of ‘epistolary education’ illuminates how Taylor and Brontë’s friendship through letters was formative in developing both writers’ feminist consciousness and their agitation for social reform, as well as their authorial agency.

Un’altra casa II: La proposta culturale per l’emigrazione italiana di Cronache d’Italia (1948–63)

Single-handedly conceived and crafted by its creator, the hyper-active but relatively unknown Milan-based journalist Annibale Del Mare, the monthly Cronache d’Italia (1948–1963) was more than an eclectic bulletin of Italian news (with a special flair for entertainment, the arts, tourism, and local attractions). Supported by a discreet but consistent political backing, the magazine succeeded in weaving a veritable world wide web of Italian immigrant readers and Italophiles (well beyond the usual destinations of the Italian diaspora) – as witnessed by its gigantic epistolary archive, a treasure trove of the plights and expressive creativity of Italian immigrants worldwide.

Barbara Bodichon’s epistolary archive: silences that speak

ABSTRACT Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and imbalance as a handicap, this paper argues that the silences her epistolary archive contains can be turned into a meaningful source of information and thus are methodologically relevant. To do so, it examines the extent to which Bodichon herself might have introduced silences ([un]consciously) as a strategy to exercise power over her own narrative. In order to tease out these epistolary silences and make them speak, this paper reads them through the lens of Lisa Mazzei’s poetics of silence.

‘But to cover her shame:’ Respectability, Social Mobility, and the Middling Sort in Early Nineteenth-century England

ABSTRACT This article explores how one middling English family – the Wilkinsons, shopkeepers in industrialising Lancashire – experienced and negotiated threats to their respectability and social status during the early nineteenth-century. It contributes to the history of downward social mobility, responding to a recent call in this journal for more work on this topic. I use a rich epistolary archive to explore the Wilkinsons experiences.

FRANCESCO DATINI IN EPISTOLARY REFLECTION

The article attempts to reconstruct the mentality of the medieval burgher Francesco Datini (1335-1410) on the materials of his epistolary archive in order to study his inherent reflexive practices in the context of time and life circumstances. The period of Datini’s life (XIV-XV centuries) was marked by a number of cataclysms, among which the Great Plague Pandemic of the middle of the XIV century seems to be the most global phenomenon. People of the “Old World” who survived these shocks felt irreversible social and mental changes. Their habitual way of life seemed to go into an irrevocable past, the established group and individual identity was destroyed. At the same time, a new model of life behavior and identity has not yet taken shape. As a methodological basis for the research undertaken, we chose the methods of emotive history, which allowed us to concentrate research efforts on emotions and value orientations, as well as the theory of liminality, which focuses on studying the states impact of uncertainty on groups of people and individuals. Datini’s correspondence was divided into two parts, official — with his business partners and private — with his foster mother Monna Piera di Pratese Boschetti, his wife Monna Margarita and his closest friend, notary and judge, Ser Lapo di Macei. In business correspondence, Francesco Datini appears to be occupied exclusively with thoughts on income, prone to maxims and evil irony. In private correspondence, the religious motivation of his actions, emotions, doubts, fears and fears are revealed, which were reinforced by the eschatological expectations of the transitional period. These observations made it possible to characterize the reflexive practices of Francesco Datini as liminal. Datini’s reflexive experience turned out to be very multidimensional, reflecting the catastrophic nature of the time he lived through, which prompted him in the last years of his life to turn to charity, long fasts and asceticism.

Willa Cather's Letters in the Archive

Stories of how American novelist Willa Cather recalled and burned her letters in order to preserve her privacy are cited widely in biography and criticism. This essay argues that these stories (and related stories about the destruction of letters by Cather’s partner and literary executor, Edith Lewis) have been exaggerated well beyond the mod- est facts. While some letters were destroyed, neither Cather nor Lewis made a systematic practice of recalling and destroying letters, yet claims that they did have shaped the way scholars understand Cather’s experience of her lesbian sexuality. Cather’s extant epistolary archive has turned out to be far more substantial than such stories led scholars to believe. The example of Cather suggests that scholars need to recognize the dynamic nature of preservation and collecting and consider the specific forces and interested parties shaping access to the traces of particular women’s legacies.

The Garrick Papers: Provenance, Publication, and Reception

Abstract The Garrick Papers are among the brightest literary jewels in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This article reconstructs their provenance, along with that of significant deposits of Garrick’s correspondence held elsewhere, and examines the circumstances that led to their publication in 1831–1832. It uses unpublished manuscripts, Chancery records, and annotated sale catalogues to identify the chain of ownership between 1822, when the executors of Eva Maria Garrick (1724–1822), the actor’s widow, found them in two cabinets at her Thames-side villa at Hampton, and 1876, when they were bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum. It reveals the original order of Garrick’s epistolary archive, and his and others’ involvement in its appraisal and arrangement, the various depredations and augmentations that occurred during the fifty years that followed Eva Maria Garrick’s death, and the early critical reception and publishing history of the printed editions of Garrick’s correspondence.

Архив В.В. Розанова в Румянцевском музее

The article presents a general overview of the letters to V.V. Rozanov that he sent to . Rumyantsev Museum. The chronology of the receipt of materials from the epistolary archive to the Department of manuscripts of the Museum is traced. The author refers to the names of the persons who directly handed the materials to the archive, and who accepted and processed them. The bibliophilic priorities of the museum curator . G.P. Georgievsky and V.V. Rozanov became the basis for supplementing the epistolary collection “From the Archive of V.V. Rozanov”. The author mentions the error in dating the letter of V.V. Rozanov to G.P. Georgievsky., written to accompany the last part of the epistolary passed to the Museum inter vivos. The text of the letter is published for the first time. The importance of V.V. Rozanov’s review of the book in the “Novoye Vremya” journal at the beginning of the twentieth century is emphasized. The author’s approach to the systematization of the correspondents’ letters for their subsequent passing over to Rumyantsev Museum is shown. The author provides concise information on the contents of certain collections of letters from Rozanov’s correspondents. The main themes of V.V. Rozanov’s epistolary communication with the authors of the letters are outlined. The author takes note of Rozanov’s special attitude to the selection of letters from the archive of correspondence for further publication. in the “Literary Exiles” series.. In the forefront there are letters from Church leaders and the thinker’s allies in the field of legislation on family relations. The article highlights the problem of correctness of specifying archive code numbers of the Russian State library’s manuscript department from the museum part of the archive, which have undergone changes during their stay in the General complex of V.V. Rozanov’s manuscript archive.

«Мы были ядро, были движение…»

The article presents a general overview of the letters to V.V. Rozanov that he sent to . Rumyantsev Museum. The chronology of the receipt of materials from the epistolary archive to the Department of manuscripts of the Museum is traced. The author refers to the names of the persons who directly handed the materials to the archive, and who accepted and processed them. The bibliophilic priorities of the museum curator . G.P. Georgievsky and V.V. Rozanov became the basis for supplementing the epistolary collection “From the Archive of V.V. Rozanov”. The author mentions the error in dating the letter of V.V. Rozanov to G.P. Georgievsky., written to accompany the last part of the epistolary passed to the Museum inter vivos. The text of the letter is published for the first time. The importance of V.V. Rozanov's review of the book in the «Novoye Vremya» journal at the beginning of the twentieth century is emphasized. The author's approach to the systematization of the correspondents’ letters for their subsequent passing over to Rumyantsev Museum is shown. The author provides concise information on the contents of certain collections of letters from Rozanov’s correspondents. The main themes of V.V. Rozanov's epistolary communication with the authors of the letters are outlined. The author takes note of Rozanov’s special attitude to the selection of letters from the archive of correspondence for further publication. in the “Literary Exiles” series.. In the forefront there are letters from Church leaders and the thinker’s allies in the field of legislation on family relations. The article highlights the problem of correctness of specifying archive code numbers of the Russian State library's manuscript department from the museum part of the archive, which have undergone changes during their stay in the General complex of V.V. Rozanov's manuscript archive.

Эпистолярный архив семьи Свербеевых

The article is focused on the Sverbeev family epistolary archive study findings. Especially, this means letters of D.N. Sverbeev (1799–1874), a memoirist, and E.A. Sverbeeva (1808–1892), his wife, a hostess of the famous Moscow salon in 1840s, who had extensive ties to the Russian enlightened society. Epistolary intercourse of their sons and daughters (in particular, N.D. Sverbeev, A.D. Sverbeev and S.D. Sverbeeva) inherited and successfully maintained parents’ social ties is also of interest. The family archive maintained abundant correspondence with family friends and acquaintances including Turgenev brothers (i.e., A.I. and N.I.), K.S. and I.S. Aksakovs, N.M. and A.M. Yazykovs, archbishop Innokentii (Veniami­nov), A.N. Popov, A.S. Homyakov, I.V. Kireevskii, A.P. Elagina, S.P. Shevyryov, P.A. Vyazemskii, S.P. Trubetskoi, etc.
 Almost centenary epistolary archive of a whole family maintained remarkable social ties represents an important document of cultural memory and literary history of two generations of the Russian noble intellectuals in the XIX century. Philosophical, literary, religious and pedagogical issues are discussed in correspondence of the Sverbeev family. It demonstrates responses to the most important social and cultural events of the epoch. Also, it contains biographic, cultural and social data. Also, the Sverbeev family epistolary archive enables a comparative study of private correspondence.

Vernacular Itineraries: Korean Letters from Family to National Archive

Abstract Vernacular Korean letters were exchanged routinely in the royal and elite families of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910), and women were at least on one side of a letter’s itinerary. While male-centered literary Chinese learning held highest prestige, the patriarchal families of the time cherished their private archives, in which vernacular letters were sentimental mementos, testaments of women’s learning, and status symbols. This familial epistolary archive received varying elaborations as it transitioned into museums and departments of national literature in South Korea. While elite vernacular epistolary style (naeganch’e) embodies the core of tradition and national literature for such colonial-era intellectuals as Yi Pyŏnggi (1891–1968) and Yi T’aejun (1904–?), the anticolonial and antifeudal current of the post-1945 South Korean scholarship overlooks the elite tradition. This explains the persistent invisibility of women-centered elite vernacular culture in the contemporary scholarship of Chosŏn Korea. Developing the notion of itinerary—the transition, appropriation, and recoding of elite vernacular letters—this article ponders the implication of archival practices upon the study of the past, and highlights the knowledge systems that determined the visibility and meaning of elite vernacular culture in Korea’s modern era.

V.V. Rozanov’s Epistolary Archive in the Context of Russian Book Culture

V.V. Rozanov’s Epistolary Archive in the Context of Russian Book Culture

"I Haven't Time to Write": Martha May Eliot and American Medical Education Reform.

"We are up to our eyes in work. I have about 32 children tonight all with some contagious disease, if not two, and several very sick!" wrote Dr. Martha May Eliot to her parents in 1920, adding, "The hospital is full almost to overflowing and still they come." Eliot, who would go on to become an influential American pediatrician and public health authority, as well as the head of the Federal Children's Bureau, wrote her parents frequently during the course of her education at Radcliffe College (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), Johns Hopkins Medical School (Baltimore, Maryland), Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (Boston, Massachusetts), St. Louis Children's Hospital (St. Louis, Missouri), and Yale University Medical School (New Haven, Connecticut). Through these letters, she detailed her experience as a woman professional at elite institutions during a key transformative period in U.S. medicine. This article uses Eliot's collection of correspondence to shed light on physicians' experience of the increasingly rigorous training, testing, and licensing processes introduced in top medical schools and to offer insights into the history of women's medical education and experience in building careers as academic professionals during that time. Eliot's letters also illustrate how the newer, higher standards for medical graduates and postgraduates may have hastened-rather than hindered-the progress of some elite women in the medical profession. Today's physicians and medical educators, as well as those completing graduate training, will find much to draw on from the experience revealed by this rich epistolary archive.

The memory of Pringle as Prospero, or the cannibal that faked Caliban: issues of authority and representation in Thomas Pringle’s ethnographic poetry

This article argues that, with the benefit of hindsight, Thomas Pringle’s poetry demands of his twenty-first-century readers that they measure its commitment to manumission by the balance between the syllables of his ethnographic poetry and force of his advocacy for manumission. The two measures, though, necessitate interdisciplinary forages into his work, albeit that the risk of either full leverage or attenuation may result from any interdisciplinary exercise that straddles history, anthropology, and literature. This paper ascribes primacy to that risk. It proceeds to point out a trajectory of earlier over-simplistic ethnographic poetry from a white colonist that, upon reflection, gives way to the later scripts of manumission of his work. It disavows an ahistorical reading of Pringle’s poetry that imposes his anti-slavery sentiment as informing his poetry in general and ethnographic poetry in particular, and so demonstrates that Pringle’s ethnographic poetry – unlike his celebrated manumission epistolary archive – does not support a singular reading of a humanizing intention. Pringle’s poetic sensibility – however much laudable – remains at odds with his political convictions: he inaugurates a Calibanesques axis through which Southern Africans in the settler colony vacillate between ‘Othering’ silence and colonized ‘voicing’. All told, Pringle’s ethnography poetry is shown to render the indigenous subjects as Calibanesque and, by that very fact, ‘cannibalizes’ him as he devours and usurps their right to self-representation.

Affecting Evidence: Edith Thompson's Epistolary Archive

In December 1922, London was enthralled by a sensational murder trial at the Old Bailey. The 28-year-old woman at the centre of the scandal, Edith Thompson, came to notoriety when her lover, 20-year-old Freddy Bywaters, a merchant seaman, murdered her husband, Percy Thompson, when the couple was returning home from the theatre late one evening. When 62 of her letters were found on his ship, he confessed, but insisted that she had no part in the crime. In her letters, she claimed that she put ‘something into Percy's tea’ and put ‘big pieces’ of light bulb in his porridge, and there were ambiguous passages about ‘taking risks’ and their future together. Thompson's letters were entered into the trial as evidence of incitement and conspiracy. Their melodramatic structure and rhetoric made it difficult to extract stable meaning. It was, however, precisely the melodramatic attributes and intimate details of her letters — with their expressions of psychic pain, longing, desire, frustration, boredom, and the material details of private lives — that made them irresistible to the public and the media. In the first part of this paper, I examine the discourses that were used to interpret the letters in the trial, and render their author culturally intelligible. In the second part, I analyse the affective mediation of the case — including the trial, the verdict, the executions, and the controversy about the death penalty — in the media, and the role of the media in producing public feelings. I argue that the concept of melodrama, understood not as a genre but as a mode which names heightened emotion, acted like a contagion, spreading affect from the letters to the courtroom and the media. What conclusions can we draw — about law and affect, evidence and intimacy, public archives and private lives — from this case that are relevant for feminist critical legal scholarship today?

“You are no stranger to me”

“You are no stranger to me”

“Living in Two Tenses”: On the Intimate Archives of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Although Sylvia Townsend Warner is most well known for her novels and short stories, her late career is marked by a commitment to biographical writing. This essay argues that Warner’s struggle to complete a biography of T.H. White led her to develop what Ann Cvetkovich has called an “archival mode of witness,” and her subsequent preservation, compilation, and annotation of an epistolary archive documenting the nearly 40 years of her relationship with Valentine Ackland demonstrates a queer politics of trans-temporal affiliation and (re)production.

Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings (review)

Reviewed by: Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings Maria Photiou (bio) Maria Tamboukou. Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John’s Letters and Paintings. British Sociological Association Auto/Biography Study Group Studies in Life Writing, Biography, Memoir vo1. 1. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. 199 pp. ISBN 978-1433108600, $73.95. Maria Tamboukou’s Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces explores the visual and textual archives associated with the career and life of the Welsh artist Gwen John (1876–1939). Tamboukou’s research interest in auto/biographical narratives, along with her project of writing a genealogy of women artists, resulted in further research related to John’s letters and paintings. In particular, Tamboukou focuses on John’s letters to the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt (1878–1966). Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces takes us on a journey to explore Gwen John not only as a talented artist, but furthermore, as a passionate women in [End Page 364] love with Rodin. The book is comprised of eight chapters offering a range of documents relating to John’s life and professional career. The book begins with a useful narration of John’s early life and artistic education at the Slade School of Fine Arts, and moves on to an extended narrative analysis of her letters, largely written after John’s 1904 move to Paris. The first chapter sets out the overall approach to the letters and paintings as “important events,” and introduces John as a nomadic figure. Tamboukou argues that John’s letters and paintings form a mode of communication, which she explores using what she calls a “narrative machine.” In the following three chapters Tamboukou establishes John’s letters and paintings as an “assemblage” of words and visuals. Chapter five details John’s relation to spaces, both public and private, while merging experiences of solitude and communication. Chapter six focuses on discourses of power and desire in unfolding John’s passion for her lover, while chapter seven highlights John’s fascination with cats. Finally, chapter eight emphasizes the importance of the archive for exploring John’s life and work. In her analysis Tamboukou favors discourses of femininity and artistic creation, aiming to voice John’s letters as nomadic narratives of a woman artist who lived in solitude for most of her life. Tamboukou employs a number of theoretical approaches to explore issues relating to epistolary narrative, while drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s concept of the “narratable self” to examine “who Gwen John” was: both a woman artist encountering the male-dominated art scene, and an artist who had to pose as a model to survive. Tamboukou’s narrative analysis helps us understand John’s dilemma, caught between “power and desire.” John’s encounter with Rodin overshadowed her long-sought desire to be a renowned artist, but her unconditional love for “her master” resulted in two thousand letters to Rodin that Tamboukou reads through Foucauldian analytics of power and Deleuzo-Guattarian analytics of desire. In working with John’s letters, Tamboukou uses narrative texts as fields of visual forces to explore John’s world and to explore the power of narration and the forces of desire. John’s extensive epistolary archive, Tamboukou concludes, outlines a “self-examination through daily correspondence,” while the practice of love letters reflects a Foucauldian “care of the self.” The book highlights the connection between John’s letters and self-portraits. Both provide narrative approaches for identifying her nomadic paths to becoming a distinguished artist. Tamboukou’s method for elaborating the various meanings of both visual and textual narratives results in a compelling portrait of the “real” Gwen John. [End Page 365] A book about an artist can be expected to include a decent quantity of illustrations, and more illustrations would definitely have enhanced this book. Nevertheless, Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces is a valuable contribution to the history of women artists, and will certainly be welcomed by feminist researchers and art historians. Maria Photiou Maria Photiou is a PhD student at Loughborough University School of the Arts (Leicestershire, UK). Her research is centered on women’s art practice and feminist aesthetics, and she is a specialist in the art and politics of Cyprus. She...