The roundtable session brought together an international group of academics and archivists to reconsider transatlantic networks of correspondence specifically via women’s letter writing. The timeframe, the nineteenth and early twentieth century, seemed particularly pertinent to us, as the nineteenth century witnessed a growing public presence of women and increased (transatlantic) mobility and thus more and more transatlantic relations and communications. At the same time,  the letter lost its “public nature and function,” as Maryanne Dever puts it (117). By the twentieth century, letters were no longer expected to be read to and circulated among friends and families. Instead, “a sense of assumed intimacy breathes from every line” (Spacks 70–71). Between these two extremes, letters could take on many forms, often containing parcels and books, selective passages that were meant to be read allowed or copied to additional recipients, some marked as “to be burned” after reading, with others intended to be published in print.

When Laura and I conceived of this roundtable, we were especially interested in the letters of women with public careers. For middle and upper class women in general, letter-exchange was both a daily practice and thus an everyday occurrence, as it was “an inadvertent powerful practice [that] can be read as a form of exercising female agency”  (Simon-Martin 10–12) – or as Maria Tomboukou puts it, letters are “ a discursive technique of safeguarding solitude while sustaining communication, a paradox of the social self” (1).

With our focus on professional women (artist, authors, activists),  we wanted to additionally explore how “private” letters contradict or complement these women’s public perception, how correspondence might have been used to support their careers and activism, and how letters might even complicate the common distinction between public and private to begin with. 

Correspondences are therefore a highly insightful and fascinating object of study—but also a challenging one. Particularly those of us trained in literary studies, for example, might need to ‘un-train’ some of our methods. As Daniel Karlin, editor of the letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett warns: ‘the correspondence has a plot of which the letters themselves could not be aware” (xii). While we read these letters as a continuous story, there were written and received often with long gaps of time in between, especially as they crossed the Atlantic. Additionally, different parts of letters could take on different meanings: Stationary could tell their own story, as could handwriting or modes of address – especially in correspondence among people of different status and unequal power relations.

Beside these historical and theoretical concerns, we also designed the panel to address the practical concern of working with letters, many of which only available in archives. Our participants therefore considered issues of access and digitization, transcription and preservation that illustrate the status of life writing in scholarship and the different modes of telling transatlantic stories that would otherwise be inaccessible. 

Our panelists:

Etta Madden (Missouri State University) illuminated the emotional gaps between the “Letters from Rome” Anne Hampton Brewster (1819-1892) wrote for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and the Boston Daily Advertiser and private letters she received, which prompted outpourings in her diaries. For more than twenty years Brewster’s bolstered the professional profiles of artists such as Harriet Hosmer but also inflamed jealousy among writers such Anna Edwards, who sought her support. (Twitter, Blog)

Considering the implications of letters that Frederick Douglass sent from the U. S. to Britain, during the Civil War, Sarah Meer (University of Cambridge) argued that it was Julia Griffiths who passed these to a British newspaper, and that their printing drew, paradoxically, on the authenticating prestige bestowed by the sense that they were private testimony.

Elizabeth A. Novara (Library of Congress) reflected on the use of women’s letters in public engagement and outreach efforts, including a gallery exhibition and online crowdsourced transcription campaigns, during the United States women’s suffrage centennial. Letters discussed will document the importance of personal relationships, transatlantic connections, and political ambitions of correspondents such as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Blackwell, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Nellie Quander. (If you haven’t done so yet, you should all explore the Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote online exhibit which Liz co-curated.)

Julie Olin-Ammentorp (Le Moyne College) discussed the letters of Willa Cather (1873-1947) from France, focusing on Cather’s first trip in 1902, at age twenty-eight. The lifelong Francophile wrote both public letters documenting her trip and personal letters to friends and family members. Paradoxically, while the personal letters reveal her deepening admiration for French culture, it is in the public letters that she reveals her growing ambitions as a writer.

Laura Rattray (University of Glasgow) discussed the unpublished correspondence between Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and art historian Mary Berenson (1864-1945). While Wharton’s friendship with Mary’s (in)famous husband, Bernard Berenson, has long taken centre stage, this short talk considers the writer’s complex negotiation of public gossip and private revelations, with a rare intimacy and vulnerability revealed through correspondence with her female friend.