Foray into Archival Research

For my Field Report for the course I am taking on literary theory and the archives, I submitted a request form online to view the following works in the Hicks Special Collection at Oakland University in order to conduct on-site research into materials related to my primary area of scholarly interest, British women writers of the long eighteenth century: The Wife and The Husband by Eliza Haywood (1756); the Haywood-edited Female Spectator, volume 3 (1744-46); novels by Haywood (1693-1756) and Aphra Behn (1640-1689); Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M–y W—–y M——e; written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1785); Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1808); and Margaret Cavendish’s Life of William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle, to which is added the true relation of my birth, breeding and life. I am so excited about seeing all of these rare books and would like to leave myself open to some degree of happenstance at my visit at the archive–so this may change–however, at this time I am most interested in further researching Montagu’s Letters and Haywood’s Female Spectator for the Mini-Edition and Final Project components of this course. 

Montagu’s letters are readily available for research and for more scholarly digital edition-making. Samuel Johnson referred to her as “Queen of the Blues” due to her patronage in the Bluestockings; Montagu was a key literary figure, patron, and essayist. Wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, Montagu describes in her letters her travels to the Ottoman Empire, thought to be the first secular writing by an Englishwoman about the Middle East. Also, Montagu was an early non-antivaxer; after traveling abroad she advocated for smallpox inoculation in Britain. Novelist Frances Burney wrote about Montagu–and Johnson, of course–in her diaries and letters, a creative nonfiction work of utmost importance to eighteenth-century studies due to its spanning her life from the age of 16 to her eighties, and I am interested in connections between the two women, their nonfiction writing and self-fashioning and, especially for this class, their travel writing. Due to their class difference–Burney, a novelist and aspiring playwright who struggled against her father, court musician Charles Burney and his friend Samuel Crisp, to forge her writing career, and Montagu an established member of the gentry class–comparing Burney’s self-fashioning through nonfiction writing with Montagu’s would reveal intersections of gender and class for eighteenth-century female writers. Another key text to the history of female self-fashioning through nonfiction writing that I would like to examine at the archive is Haywood’s Female Spectator. A satirical riff on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s definitive eighteenth-century periodical, The Spectator, Haywood’s essays in straightforward prose style focused on love, marriage and morality as an unnamed “Female Spectator.” I am unsure if this story is contained in volume 3, available at the OU archive, however, I am especially interested in the following anecdote that I understand to occur somewhere within the Female Spectator-verse that intersects eerily/perfectly with my research for the Warrior Women Project digital edition–an essay including an anecdote about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy to follow her lover in the army. Haywood’s publication did not purport to participate in newsgathering or editorializing on current affairs (other than women’s morality) like the (male) Spectator did. If the male was authorized to spectate/gaze on matters political, the female gaze was authorized to follow female-worthy subjects, although Haywood did write extensively in it on Frances Bacon. Montagu’s travel writing and Haywood’s Female Spectator are key nonfiction texts for my journey into the history of female self-fashioning through writing.