Working in Womens Archives: Researching Womens Private Literature and Archival Documents

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents for Working in Womens Archives: Researching Womens Private Literature and Archival Documents , edited by Helen M. Buss and Marlene Kadar Introduction | Helen M. Buss Locating Female Subjects in the Archives | Carole Gerson Constructing Female Subjects in the Archive: A Reading of Three Versions of One Womans Subjectivity | Helen M. Buss Researching Eighteenth-Century Maritime Women Writers: Deborah How CottnamA Case Study | Gwendolyn Davies A Dusting Off: An Anecdotal Account of Editing the L.M. Montgomery Journals | Mary Rubio Reading My Grandmothers Life from Her Letters: Constance Kerr Sissons from Adolescence to Engagement | Rosalind Kerr Personal Papers: Putting Lives on the LineWorking with the Marian Engel Archive | Christl Verduyn An Epistolary Constellation: Trotsky, Kahlo, Birney | Marlene Kadar Afterword | Marlene Kadar Contributors Helen M. Buss (aka Margaret Clarke), is a professor in the English Department at the University of Calgary. She is the author of novels, plays and poetry, as well as books and articles on Canadian literature and life writing. In 1983 she won a best-first-novel prize in Manitoba for her book The Cutting Season , and in 1993 she won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for her study of Canadian womens autobiography, Mapping Our Selves . Her current writing and research centres on the memoir form. In 1999 she published Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood , and has recently completed a book on womens uses of the memoir form with the working title, Repossessing the World: Reading and Writing Contemporary Womens Memoirs . Gwendolyn Davies is Dean of Graduate Studies and a member of the English Department at the University of New Brunswick. She has authored or edited various books and articles on Maritime literature and is particularly interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century womens writing and cultural history in the Atlantic provinces. Carole Gerson, a professor in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, has done extensive research on Canadian literary history and early Canadian women writers. In addition to many articles, her publications include A Purer Taste: The Writing and Reading of Fiction in English in Nineteenth-Century Canada (1989), Canadas Early Women Writers: Texts in English to 1859 (1994), Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings through the First World War (1994), co-edited with Gwendolyn Davies, and Paddling Her Own Canoe: Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionake) (2000), co-authored with Veronica Strong-Boag. She is currently a member of the editorial team working on The History of the Book in Canada/ Lhistoire du livre et de lédition au Canada . Marlene Kadar is the Director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University. She teaches in the Humanities Division and in Womens Studies. Her published works include Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992), Reading Life Writing (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993) and Write Down Everything Just as You Know It: A Portrait of Ibolya Szalai Grossman, Great Dames , ed. Elspeth Cameron and Janice Dickin (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997). Her current research investigates Holocaust/ Porramjos life-writing narratives and archival documents in order to examine the categories of ethnicity in the Hungarian-speaking regions of Central Europe. Rosalind Kerr is an assistant professor of Dramatic Theory and Criticism in the Drama Department of the University of Alberta. Her main areas of concentration are modern and contemporary dramatic and performance theory with an emphasis on feminist, gay/lesbian / queer and critical race theory. She is preparing a book on the first Italian actresses in sixteenth-century Commedia dellArte. Another very important interest is in womens auto/biography, focusing primarily on her grandmother Constance Kerr Sissons's archive of letters, journals and an as yet unpublished novel. Mary Henley Rubio is a professor of English at the University of Guelph where she has taught since 1967. With Elizabeth Waterston, Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, she has edited The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery (Volumes 1 to 4 with a fifth volume to come [Oxford UP]), co-written Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery (ECW Press) and co-published many other items on Montgomery. Since its founding in 1975, she has co-edited the academic journal CCL: Canadian Childrens Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse . Mary Rubios most recent publication on Montgomery is L. M. Montgomery: Scottish-Presbyterian Agency in Canadian Culture, L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture , ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly (U of Toronto P), and she is working on the official biography of Montgomery. Christl Verduyn teaches and writes about Canadian literature, with special interest in Canadian and Québécois womens writing and criticism, multiculturalism, life writing and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. Her books include Margaret Laurence: An Appreciation (1988), Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The MacLennan-Engel Correspondence (1995), Lifelines: Marian Engels Writing (1995), Literary Pluralities (1998) and Marian Engels Notebooks (1999). Before joining the faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2000, Christl Verduyn taught at Trent University, where she was founding chair of Womens Studies (198790) and chair of Canadian Studies (199399). She is currently president of the National Association for Canadian Studies (20002002).

About the Author :
Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women's studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies. Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women's life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry. Three of her most recent books published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press are Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, edited with D.L. Macdonald and Anne McWhir, and Working in Women's Archives edited with Marlene Kadar.