Monday, January 26, 2015

Alice

My research relates to a hunt for a lost voice:  I need to find out more about the 'after-life' of Woolf's marketing agent, Norah Nicholls, whose life I've mapped to the 1960s, but through whose grandson, I now know there is more.   Connections need to be followed up at Bryn Mawr, New York city archives, and the Barbara Tuchman family.    Why?  What does this add to what I already know or have published?  Why keep digging?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fascinating cultural criticism but what are the literary critical stakes? Isn't this just literary gossip? Why would anyone be interested in marginalia figures working for the Woolfs? What's Woolf got to do with it?

Anonymous said...

Woolf was fascinated by the lives of the obscure (and not just prostitutes, natch), and so what is at stake in the longer narrative about her obscure marketing agent is how factors like class, voice, personality, background, and professional aspiration in the interwar segment of emerging professional woman do or don't 'match' up with the kinds of metaphoric constructions of authorship/identity/work Woolf deploys.