Creating a Global, Transatlantic, British Women Writers Commonplace Book
By Hannah Blanning, The University of Colorado, Boulder
Fig. 1: Spoken phrase widely attributed to Dr. Louise Bennett-Coverley, Jamaican poet and comedian.
If you open our olive-green, felt-covered commonplace book and thumb your way to page 12, you will find "I believe in laughter” inscribed there. This affirmation, which Dr. Louise Bennett-Coverley is reported to have made, records orality in print much in the way that this iconic Jamaican poet—known as “Miss Lou”—utilized the dialect of Jamaican Creole to reach new poetic heights in her writing. Bennett-Coverley represents one of many women’s voices documented in our growing, commonplace archive. Through the voices collected there, the book embodies the interaction that the organizers of the 32nd Annual British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) hoped to ignite: it draws scholars and writers into conversation with women authors while fostering community and transmission through group writing.
As the core of the 2024 BWWC steering committee, Dr. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and graduate co-chair Jessica Tebo and I knew that scholars would share knowledge through panel and plenary presentations at the conference and that ideas would flow over conversation and coffee; however, we were committed to creating additional knowledge-sharing opportunities. Given that our conference theme of “Reproduction(s)” focused on creation and recreation, we seized on a unique opportunity for participants to work with the theme intellectually and holistically. To that end, we planned outings for conference attendees to experience artwork and objects created through reproductive processes: guides took groups to see a botanical illustration exhibit on campus and to explore decades of print technology at the University of Colorado’s Media Archeology Lab; attendees examined eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts and editions in Norlin Library’s Rare and Distinctive Collections; and, venturing into uncharted territory, we invited participants to create a group conference poster using a repurposed canvas, second-hand paper, recycled and found objects, and used art supplies. Yet, one question remained: how would we jointly collect women’s voices? How could we initiate communal reading? The answer to these questions burgeoned through K-SAA’s 2023-2024 public Commonplacing initiative: during the conference, we would make a Global, trans-Atlantic, British Women Writers Commonplace Book.
Fig. 2: Title page of the BWW Commonplace Book, created May 28-30, 2024 at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Over the course of three-days, eighteen scholars committed portraits, photographs, snippets of their own analyses, and quotations by women authors to paper, ensuring, as Contributor 13 noted, that “Ideas survive those who give them birth.”[1] While writing, contributors engaged in shared reading, perusing quotations that other participants had inscribed before them. Articulated with palpable urgency, these citations cross continents and span the seventeenth through the twenty-first century, often recording the words of women authors rediscovered during the last thirty years: a budding recovery treasure trove.
Numerous contributions to the book capture women’s struggles for self-determination and freedom. Contributors 2 and 9 excavated voices of women yearning for liberty by respectively quoting Hester Pulter’s seventeenth-century “Why Must I thus Forever Be Confined,” which was rediscovered in the Leeds University Brotherton Library in 1996, and Caroline Norton’s English Laws for Women (1854). Focusing on the importance of autonomy, contributor 8 evoked that “most difficult problem for women” of knowing that one “must answer one day” for one’s “own life.”[2] For white women contending with patriarchal legal systems that disenfranchised them, and for women of color facing the ruptures of slavery and acute legal repression, answering for one’s “own life” was, of course, immensely difficult.
Other quotes correlate the quality of women’s lives with their ability to embody desire. While Contributor 1 emphasized the corporeal impact of unfulfilled longing as depicted in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, where “want[…] send[s] all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain,”[3] Contributor 17 quoted the liberating philosophy of desire that the female protagonist develops with Benedict Spinoza in Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink (2017). Contributor 18, on the other hand, invites us to meditate on the nature of feminine sexual euphoria by noting Fantomina’s advice to “all Neglected Wives, and Fond abandon’d Nymphs” to employ her radical method, which consists of “passing” herself off “as a new Mistress” to her lover “whenever the Ardour, which alone makes Love a Blessing, begins to diminish.”[4] These contributions document women’s preoccupation with the right to guide and determine the nature of their own sensual existence.
Questions of memory and dialogue also suffuse quotations that participants noted in our BWW Book. Sharing part of her conference paper on the Stainforth Collection, Contributor 11, Nadin Nasr, observed that being in a “rectory library, amid Stainforth’s collection, amid the voices of 2800 women represented there” enabled her to “imagine” the materiality of these poets’ books “in a world that historically devalued the presence of women and what they had to say.”[5] Contributor 4 brought Anne Bannerman’s scrutiny of recollection-as-tradition to this archive by quoting notes to “The Prophecy of Merlin” in Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. In a different vein, Contributor 6 probed issues of memory and poetic reproduction by including contemporary poet Jennifer Chang’s searing response to Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of daffodils. Moreover, connecting readers to both Lucile Clifton’s twentieth-century poem “why people be mad at me sometimes” and Dr. Patricia Matthew’s BWWC keynote presentation in which the poem figured prominently, Contributor 12’s citation charts a striking conference moment while eliciting reflection about memory and appropriation.
Fig. 3: The first lines are excerpted from "Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal Written at Grasmere (From 1st January 1802 to 8th July 1802)" in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. I (of 2), edited by William Knight, (London: Macmillian and Co., Ltd., 1897). Jennifer Chang’s response to Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal entry appears below it, creating a direct conversant exchange between these works rather than between Dorothy Wordsworth’s entry and William Wordsworth’s canonical “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Jennifer Chang, “Dorothy Wordsworth,” (The Academy of American Poets: 2012). Accessed August 8, 2024. https://poets.org/poem/dorothy-wordsworth
A final cluster of contributions utilized portraiture and text to remember and generate new-found understandings of women authors. Contributors 14 and 15, Dr. Patricia Matthew and Dr. Roxanne Eberle, respectively added portraits of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen combined with quotes from Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Pride and Prejudice, decontextualizing lines that Frankenstein’s creature and Caroline Bingley speak in these novels in a manner that associates the lines quoted with the authors themselves. As Fly Paper Literary Vinyl Stickers designed to decorate water bottles, laptops, or phone cases, these images and text also underscore how industrialization and mass production have disseminated fragments of literary works, recasting them for a wider reading public.
Fig. 4: Fly paper vinyl stickers quoting the Creature’s threat to his creator in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Caroline Bingley talking to Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. https://flypaperproducts.com/collections/vinyl-stickers
Contributor 16, on the other hand, offered a photograph of recently recovered woman writer Eliza Medhurst Hillier (1828-1893) to document her work and existence. Medhurst Hillier’s gaze looks out from the past and meets the reader’s in tranquil defiance.
Fig. 5: University of Bristol - Historical Photographs of China reference number: Hi-s006. “Eliza Mary Hillier (born Medhurst)” (1852). Accessed August 7, 2024. https://hpcbristol.net/visual/Hi-s006
In sum, the words and portraits that scholars reproduced by copying and committing them into our commonplace book enact the recovery work that the British Woman Writers Association strives for, making this short “volume,” as Contributor 7 observed in quoting Vernon Lee’s Belcaro, “the first fruit of this attempt at knowing.”[6] Commonplacing thus proved to be an invaluable tool for communal knowledge-gathering and sharing during the conference. We thank K-SAA for their public outreach work, which inspired this initiative, and look forward to unmuffling more voices as this “first fruit” continues to grow.
The 32nd Annual British Women Writers Conference took place May 28-30, 2024 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The conference welcomed 136 participants, representing 81 national and international institutions, who presented their scholarship on 31 panels, 6 sponsored pedagogy and professionalization workshops, and plenary presentations delivered by Dr. Kate Singer and Dr. Patricia Matthew CU2024_CFP_Final.pdf. The British Women Writers Conference was founded in 1991 by Pamela Corpron Parker and Cindy Lacom with a view to bringing “writers who have been historically overlooked, ignored, or excluded from the canon” to the fore https://britishwomenwriters.org/. In keeping with the spirit of its grassroots origins, the BWWC is traditionally organized and executed by graduate students.
Notes
[1] Nussey’s words figure prominently as the epigraph for Alicia Carroll’s New Woman Ecologies, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019). The original quotation can be found in Helen G. Nussey, London Gardens of the Past, (United Kingdom: John Lane, 1939), 25.
[2] Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc., 2017), 921. Accessed August 6, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central.
[3] Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, (San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 178. Accessed August 10, 2024. Internet Archive.
[4] Eliza Fowler Haywood, Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze, Being a Secret History of an Amour Between Two Persons of Condition. First published in Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (London: Dan Browne and S. Chapman, 1725), Vol. 3, 283. Accessed August 8, 2024. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/haywood/fantomina/fantomina.html
[5] Nadin Nasr, “Stainforth’s Library: Working Tool or Intellectual Monument?”, Conference Paper Presented at the British Women Writers Conference, Boulder, Colorado, May, 2024.
[6] Vernon Lee, Belcaro - Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. [N.p.]: Read & Co. Great Essays. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=f7695ccc-52bc-3362-b884-cd82ab2ceb54.
About the Author
Hannah Blanning is a PH.D. candidate in English at the University of Colorado specializing in British and French Romantic era literature. Her research interests include autonomy, gender, the relationship between radical ontologies and politics, and comparative literature. Exploring women’s writing as a space where abstract philosophical ideas and material embodiment of those merge in dynamic interplay, her dissertation argues that while predominant Enlightenment philosophical traditions championed free will as paradigmatic of freedom and subjectivity, certain women writers offered relational understandings of agency by narratively portraying the extent to which human interactions and environments shape and affect our ability to flourish. Hannah co-chaired the 2024 British Women Writers Conference Steering Committee and has served as a pedagogical lead and Engaged Arts and Humanities Cohort Scholar.