The first shipment of Parole Femine has arrived, and we have been celebrating. Seven of the book’s 30 editors, along with Molly, the book’s designer, signed each other’s copies over a delicious Indian dinner at Namaste near Loyola’s campus.
The first books have also landed in readers’ laps. One of the project’s biggest fans, “Granny” from Philly, just received hers and tells us she intends to “read every page.” We can’t wait to hear what you think, Granny!
Granny curling up with her copy of Parole Femine.
You can order your own copy of Parole Femine at Amazon.com, and we are planning several events during the first few months of 2020, including a Salon in March during Women’s History Month, talks at area libraries and bookstores, and possibly a book club. It’s so exciting to finally see these women’s writing in print, and to be able to share their work with new readers!
Bird in Hand bookstore in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood–look for us to give a reading here in the next few months!
Like the WLCB Facebook page to be notified of events and other news about the project.
Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore has gone to press! Order your copy at Amazon.com — a perfect Christmas gift for the Baltimore history buff in your life!
Clocking in at 780 oversize pages, the book is a testament to female intellect and the second half of the Maryland state motto, “Fatti maschii, parole femine“–manly deeds, womanly words.
The editors will be celebrating the publication of the book on Tuesday, Dec. 10, at 6pm at Namaste on Cold Spring just west of Loyola’s campus. (If you’re one of said editors reading this: we hope to see you there!)
Stay tuned for the official book launch party next semester.
Congrats to all, and thanks to Kevin Atticks and Molly Werts at Lyola’s Apprentice House Press for their hard work in making this monster of a book a reality!
Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore—the anthology of WLCB writers and writings that we’ve been working on for 2+ years—is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality.
The book is currently being designed and typeset by Loyola’s Apprentice House Press, the first student-run publishing company in the country. And the first round of page proofs have arrived—clocking in at OVER 800 PAGES!! It is a hefty tome, indeed.
The page we’ve all been waiting for: page 1 of Parole Femine: Words & Lives of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.
We are working out some kinks with the design, but I am happy to share with you the first page of the book: the first page of the first section of the book, featuring writings about Baltimore and Maryland.
The manuscript of Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore, has been edited. I mean, it’s been EDITED.
This work has taken me and my summer assistant, Miranda, all of June and July. Here is the MS in all its glory– some 2000 pages (the pages you see are printed double-sided).
The 2000 pages of Parole Femine: Words and Lives of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore, in all its edited glory.
In all, comprising:
a 33-page introductory essay
50 section and author introductions
2 complete novellas
Over 200 poems
21 short stories
3 plays
Excerpts from 7 novels
26 pieces of newspaper journalism and nonfiction
21 illustrations
Hundreds of annotations identifying people, places, historical events, and literary allusions
Bibliography with over 1000 discrete publications listed from over 50 authors
Each of those little post-its you see above indicates a different work, grouped by color according to author and section. It’s all very exciting!
This has been a lot of work, but it really pales in comparison to all the work that’s been put in by students over the past two years. Students selected the texts, transcribed them, checked the transcriptions, annotated them, and researched and wrote the headnotes. To the students: YOU DID A WONDERFUL JOB.
What next?
Once I check everything one more time, it goes to the designer at Loyola’s Apprentice House Press, Kevin Atticks, who will pour all the Word files into InDesign pages. As a teaser, here’s the cover design, in case you forgot.
The cover was designed by Ellen Roussel, with help from Jill Fury.
Then I will get a few days to check the proofs. And soon after that, you’ll be able to order your very own copy on Amazon.com. We should have books in our hot little hands by the end of September– just in time for Bmore Historic, the annual Baltimore history conference held at the Museum of Industry the last Friday of September.
Students who have worked on the project will get complimentary copies–if you want one and I don’t have your address, please send! And if you are in the area and want to be part of the book launch at Bmore Historic, let me know that also. We could stage another salon!
Congrats, team! The book is finally becoming a reality!
The class has been busy researching the published authors of the WLCB. I’ve assigned each of them a group of texts for the Parole Femine anthology to annotate, and they are also doing research to flesh out the introductory headnotes for each author.
Researching annotations is a fascinating process. I think so, anyway! I realize that many people never look at annotations–members of the class have told me as much. But they can provide fascinating subtexts and suggest all kinds of ways to interpret literary texts. That said, researching and writing those annotations can feel a little bit like diving down the rabbit hole . . . over and over again.
One of my students, Alyssa Schilke, discovered just this when she tried to annotate the title of Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer’s poem, “St. Anthony.” Through her research, she was able to trace a complicated story of knights, crusaders, and saints, and how they got all thrown together in the Victorian imagination. Her research spurred us to dig deeper into the career of one of the Club’s most prolific authors. Read on.
Alyssa posted this to the course blog in March:
I spent time investigating “St. Anthony, A Christmas Eve Ballad” by Elizabeth Latimer. What bugged me the most is trying to solve which St. Anthony Latimer is writing about. She refers to him as Italian, which brings to mind St Anthony of Padua, a Franciscan monk from the 12th century.
But the poem features Latimer’s character recounting a tournament and the saint’s knightly duties, and the copy-text even features an image of a crusader resting against his horse. St. Anthony of Padua was a monk his whole life, entering the religious order at 15. [My note: So I guess he never went on a crusade.]
I came closer with a scene featuring St. Paul later in the poem. St. Anthony of Egypt is featured in a story with St. Paul of Thebes, where, as in Latimer’s poem, Anthony is present for the hermit saint’s death. But this Anthony was an early Christian ascetic from the 4th century, never a knight and too early for the Crusades. Although Latimer is using this story of a St. Anthony, this is not who she is discussing in the beginning.
Finally I found it. A reference to Anthony as “One of the world’s great Champions Seven” led me to a brief Wikipedia page, attributing the term to a Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom published in 1597.
Through some more searching and reading, I confirmed that Latimer’s St. Anthony is in fact, Johnson’s fictional character based off of St. Anthony of Padua. But in the style of Arthurian romances, St Anthony of Italy, decked out in blue, wins a tournament in front of the Byzantine Emperor in Chapter 12. This passage is exactly the piece Latimer references in her Christmas tale.
Through this long journey, I grew in appreciation for annotated works. Reading this poem the first time through, I had no idea that there are 2 St. Anthonys, nor would I have ever connected the story to Johnson’s work.
In fact, I found that Johnson work was edited to a ‘modern tone’ in 1863 by W. H. G. Kingston and republished. Perhaps Latimer encountered Kingston’s edition and it inspired her poem published in 1891. Her audience would have better understood her reference as well because the tale had been recently republished and was not 200 years old.
Latimer clearly enjoyed this story of the Champions of Christendom. She even presented a piece on St. Patrick, another of Johnston’s characters, for St. Patrick’s Day in 1903 to the club.
Alyssa’s persistence helped her succeed in solving this riddle of a monk who rode a horse and acted like an Arthurian knight. My discovery at around the same time of the 1895 list of Club publications gave us new leads to pursue– it claimed that Latimer had published several poems about Seven Champions of Christendom in popular magazines.
Today, I found one of them– the aforementioned St. Patrick, which was published in Harper’s Monthly’s sister publication, Harper’s Weekly, 3 years before the publication of “St. Anthony.” And searching for this led to additional works by Latimer we hadn’t yet recovered. So her author’s page in the Virtual Library continues to grow … and grow. The output of some of these women is difficult to believe!
First page of “St. Patrick,” by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1888.
Page from “St. Anthony,” by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, published in Harper’s Monthly in 1891.
Latimer was clearly fond of these poems. The fact that she chose to read “St. Patrick” to the Club fifteen years after it was published shows that she was still proud of this work. Interestingly, the Club minutes from this meeting state that Latimer “prefaced her reading by saying that the poem was simply one of her own imagination not founded on fact.” Whether it was actually based on Johnson’s– or Kingston’s– text is another question to think about.
The EN344 Book, Edition, Archive class’s research on the WLCB is kicking into high gear, which means new discoveries are in the offing.
For one: a couple weeks ago while rooting around in the Maryland Historical Society catalog looking for other things, I happened across a listing which ended up being a notebook containing meeting minutes from spring 1895-spring 1899– a notebook that had been deemed lost.
First pages of newly discovered volume containing WLCB minutes from 1896-1899. MD Historical Society MS 1181.
I’m guessing that this notebook got misplaced because it was quite a bit larger than the other minutes books. It probably got stuck on a shelf above or below the other materials, which is why it got catalogued under a different call number than all the other notebooks.
This means that we have historical/documentary evidence for 3 more years than we originally thought– a significant addition to the 17-18 years of meeting minutes that we have already transcribed. Cynthia (thank god for Cynthia!) is in the process of transcribing them now.
Even more significant, perhaps, is another discovery I made on the same day: an 1895 bibliography of works published by members of the Club.
I had gone to MDHS to look for the different versions of the WLCB Constitution, just to see if and how it had changed over the years. As noted in the Club history on the WLCB archive site, the Club was nearly torn apart in the early years of its existence over proposed amendments to the Constitution that would have made the Club more than literary in nature–which is to say, engaged in philanthropy and social reform. The outcome of that debate was not to change the Constitution in any significant way, and I just needed to compare the different versions to make sure that was indeed the case.
So I wasn’t really expecting to find anything. Mostly, I was going with the expectation of not finding anything interesting.
But as is so often the case when doing research in the archive, I found exactly what I wasn’t looking for. One of the versions of the Constitution I was examining was an entire pamphlet, beautifully printed on thick, creamy paper, which appeared to have been printed in honor of the Club’s 5th Anniversary. It included the Constitution, the names of all current members, the entire list of programs from 1894-1895 and 1895-1896 seasons, and … a bunch of pages that were still uncut.
Of course I had to get them cut. And when I opened them I was shocked– and thrilled– to discover that the last 12 or so pages of the pamphlet were a detailed listing of all of the Club members’ writings to that date. A gold mine!
First 2 pages of 1895 bibliography of WLCB member writings, MDHS, PAM 842
If only we had known about this bibliography two years ago, when the five students who worked with me in the summer of 2017 were in the archive transcribing documents. If only we had known about it last spring, when my Aperio seminar students were searching through catalogs and databases and online archives looking for Club member publications. If only I had had the bibliography when planning for my current semester’s class, where students are editing the works located by last year’s class. If only.
That was my initial thought. But then, I thought, maybe it was best this way. Because we may have stopped with this list, rather than finding so many of the other publications that emerged from the Club after 1895.
Of course, my first question was, did we find all the pre-1895 publications and writers? I went through the list with some trepidation, afraid that I would discover lots of writers and publications that we hadn’t located, and thus tanking the entire book project we’d been working so hard on for the past 2 years.
Luckily– or perhaps, a testament to the thoroughness of last year’s students– we only missed a few. One is Sallie Webster Dorsey, sister of Club founder Hester Dorsey Richardson and fellow member Mary Dorsey (who published under the name Marion V. Dorsey). Another is Lily G. Early, daughter of founding member Maud Graham Early (one of the “Miss Early”s referred to in Club minutes). I am in the process of tracking down the publications listed for these writers.
And I was able to confirm that Elizabeth M. Reese (Mrs. Percy M. Reese) did, indeed, publish; we were unable to confirm this last spring and had cut her from the anthology, but now we can add her back in. And the list reveals additional publications by other Club members. One of the most tantalizing is a Civil War memoir by Lucy Randolph Cautley, for whom we thus far had only been able to locate one published poem. Her memoir “A Child’s Recollection of the War” was apparently published in the Philadelphia Times–an interesting fact because Cautley was a Southern sympathizer. Unfortunately, there is no date listed for the publication of the memoir, and the Philadelphia Times is only available on microfilm … which is being sent from the Pennsylvania State Library, 5 reels at a time. Finding this work will be a summer 2019 project for yours truly.
We also now know of additional novels by Elizabeth T. Graham, poems by Elizabeth Latimer, and more works by Katharine Pearson Woods (yes, there were members of the WLCB not named Elizabeth). And today I was able to locate two stories by Louise Clarkson Whitelock that we previously didn’t know about, published in Godey’s Magazine and Harper’s, both well-known and well-respected national magazines of the day. (These stories were published under her maiden name, incidentally: “L. Clarkson”; by 1895 she appears to have married her husband, politician George Whitelock, because her 1895 story collection A Mad Madonna is published under her married name.)
Table of Contents of January 1894 issue of Godey’s Magazine, where “L. Clarkson” published her story “Monsieur Vigor’s Diamonds.”
First page of Louise Clarkson’s “The End of Animosity,” in the well-respected magazine Harper’s Monthly.
These discoveries, to be sure, will continue! I hope to share things that this year’s class of students are discovering in upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, I’ll be giving my first public talk about the WLCB at the Maryland Historical Society on April 16!
Hey Aperio Log followers– we have a new class working on the Parole Femine/Woman’s Lit Club of Baltimore project, and things are kicking into high gear.
We went on a field trip yesterday to get a sense of the literary environs of Mount Vernon, where many of the early members of the WLCB lived, and a neighborhood that served as the cultural center of Baltimore for much of its history. This tour was a follow-on to a tour I organized for last year’s class, which focused on the homes of writers in the Bolton Hill and Midtown/Belvedere neighborhoods, just north and west of where we were this weekend.
We visited the Maryland Historical Society, where the WLCB papers are housed, and took a walking tour of bookstores and authors’ residences, including the home of Hester Dorsey Richardson, one of the brainchilds behind the club. And of course we had to have lunch at Mt. Vernon Marketplace.
Baltimore Literary Culture Tour–Mt. Vernon
Here’s where we went–including a few stops that were planned but we didn’t quite get to. Bookstores and libraries are cross-referenced to my “Books in Baltimore, Then and Now” tour on the izi.TRAVEL app.
711, 825, and 829 Park Ave., residences of Maud Graham Early (and daughters Lily & Eveline), Eliza Ridgely, first secretary of the WLCB, and Elizabeth King, the WLCB Vice President who led the faction wanting to expand the scope of the Club in 1893
515 N. Howard, site of Frigate Book Shop (#14 on Books in Baltimore tour)
SW corner of Mulberry & Park, in Baltimore’s old Chinatown, former site of Abe Sherman’s bookstore (#4 (#14 on Books in Baltimore tour)
408 Park Ave., site of New Era radical bookstore (#5)
Mt. Vernon Marketplace (LUNCH!)
Enoch Pratt Free Library (#6)
SE corner Mulberry & N. Charles, site of Remington’s Book Shop (#7), shop frequented by the ladies of the WLCB (and publisher of some of their works)
516 N. Charles, site of A People United clothing store, Cokesbury religious bookstore (#8), and Haughton & Haughton dressmakers (owned by Louisa C. O. Haughton; read a post about Haughton & Haughton here)
518 N. Charles, site of Louie’s Bookstore & Café (#9)
Quiltmaker Mimi Dietrich talks about her quilts in an impromptu gallery tour at MDHS.
Atlas of Baltimore–with David Armenti, Head of Education at MDHS.
Maryland Suffrage News–front page.
Reading Lydia Crane’s handwriting in the WLCB Minutes books.
Perusing programs at the Maryland Historical Society
Puzzling over programs and minutes books in the WLCB collection at Maryland Historical Society
Site where the Frigate Book Shop once stood, in the middle of what was once Baltimore’s theater district
New Era Bookstore building, 400 block Park Ave.
The interior of New Era today.
Lunch!
Enoch Pratt Free Library, desegregated from its inception in 1888
The group on Mt. Vernon Place, just south of the Washington Monument
The only letdown was that we had hoped to see the gorgeous interior of the Peabody Library reading room at 17 E. Mt. Vernon Place. The library was established by George Peabody and opened in 1878, just a few years before the Enoch Pratt Free Library a few blocks away. Like the Pratt, it was intended “for the free use of all persons who desire to consult it.” After becoming part of the Pratt Library system, it was absorbed into the Johns Hopkins University system in 1982 and now houses part of their Special Collections department.
As a wholly inadequate consolation prize, here are some images of the interior taken by others.
And we hit the Baltimore Book Thing in Waverly on our way back to campus– where all the books are free! (Which still doesn’t seem to help Garrison Keillor <cue sad trombones>…)
More Garrison Keillor than you could ever possibly want — free for the taking at the Baltimore Book Thing
We had a great time– but I can’t help but wish all those old bookstores were still open.
