I’m properly back into the swing of things now, and wish that these weeks before the semester officially begins could be stretched a bit to prolong this period of quasi-preparedness. I feel a little like I’m working ahead of schedule, when really I have a whole summer behind me worth of work that should have been accomplished. It’s still summer, I keep telling myself. I have time. And long days of reading with L and M are supposed to keep me focused and goal-oriented.
But there are different levels of work, and this week I’ve spent most of my time working on fun things. I’m helping to put together an exhibit about nineteenth-century women writers in the university library. I think I might have gone a bit overboard today, showing up at a meeting with 20-pages of handout notes. But before you start thinking I’m one of those kids that used to do extra homework in school to make sure I had it down (erm…), the reason for this insanity was actually the amount of fun I’ve been having with this. In the rare book room, hidden away in the archives, is an entire cart that displays my name in large sharpie letters. And on this cart are diaries from the 1840s, 50s, 60s; a first edition Pride and Prejudice; serial copies of Middlemarch, with their crumbling green paper covers; feminist pamphlets and periodicals; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1865 illustrated copy of his sister’s Goblin Market; Virginia Woolf’s cousin’s childhood diary, in which the entry for June 22, 1897 (Victoria’s Jubilee) is penned in red ink; unrequited love letters from 1803; and so, so much more. It’s a little slice of paradise. A few weeks before I left for England, I was carefully combing through some papers, looking at letters from the “anti-feminist” writer Eliza Lynn Linton to a man named Thomas Wardle. They are hidden amoungst Wardle’s papers in the archives. And I stumbled across a handful of letters which had tiny pieces of fabric attached to the corners. Wardle was a calico and silk dyer, and the letters were from William Morris.
I have a cool job.
And it’s made even more fabulous by our amazing collections. We should feature a feminist pamphlet? Sure – there’s one in the archives. We need to feature a good example of a professional writer’s autobiography? Okay, there’s a first edition of Margaret Oliphant’s in special collections. Need an example of a woman traveling alone in the nineteenth century? Mary Kingsley’s first edition Travels in West Africa — check. It’s like a treasure trove. I’m hooked.
Next step is to sort through the material to make final decisions on which items to include, as well as to comb through the pages to find images that might be appropriate for the exhibit. I’m not getting paid a penny to do this, but sometimes I feel like I should be paying someone to play with these papers. Two days ago, I was reading a set of eight letters from a woman named A Maria Williams to John Dovaston, a minor poet and naturalist. The letters were sent between November and December of 1803, and we unfortunately don’t have the replies, so you have to piece together bit-by-bit what was going on. It’s not to hard to figure it out: “A Maria” was in love with Dovaston. She’s a little desperate, actually, pouring out her desire for his friendship (she underlines a lot of important things in her letters), but noting that if she were in a different type of situation things might be different. In about the sixth letter, she tells him about a terrible rumour she has heard: someone has been saying that she had visited his house with the base intention of sleeping with him. Thank the Heavens, she writes, that she is perfectly innocent of such a heinous affront to female delicacy. It’s obvious where she’s going, and the last letter pours it all out. He has found her out. Yes, she loves him. But she is going away now, putting herself into service (perhaps as a governess?), with the hopes that one day she will be able to live without him. She wants to close her eyes to this life.
Dovaston never married. He obviously never returned Williams’s rather childish devotion. Yes, it is childish; and I probably wouldn’t give these letters much thought if I read them in Times New Roman. But I can’t explain quite what they did to me as I gobbled up the words on those yellowed pages. I spent over two hours reading through these letters, feeling like a voyeur, my fingers where his fingers lay, my gaze tracing her thin, slanted script. Each letter was folded and sealed with bright red wax. I wondered if her A was the same as mine.
The exhibit will appear in December. Perhaps I should consider library science after the Ph.D…
