Enfilade

As announced this spring (27 April) by the NYPL:

New Manuscript Finding Aids for 18th- and 19th-Century Women Writers

Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library

Here at the Pforzheimer Collection we have been busy creating new and updating existing finding aids to help researchers better navigate our world-renowned assemblage of literary manuscripts relating mostly to British authors active during the late-18th and early-to-mid-19th centuries. The Pforzheimer Collection’s holdings of letters, diaries, notebooks, literary drafts, and other handwritten material provide a great deal of insight into an author’s life and work that is often not available in any other form.

To mark Mary Wollstonecraft’s 267th birthday, this post highlights a portion of the Pforzheimer Collection’s holdings of manuscript material by or relating to 19 women writers. These women were some of the most popular and well-regarded authors of their day and their contributions continue to shape our understanding of literary history.

Because Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer of feminist thought, materials by and concerning women have always formed an important component of the Pforzheimer Collection. Books and manuscripts by many lesser-known women writers of the period can be found along with advice books, manuals on child-rearing, etiquette, domestic economy, and a number of key proto-feminist texts. Carl H. Pforzheimer (1879–1957) began collecting the literary manuscripts of Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the 1920s, decades before collectors and institutions paid much attention to all but a few women writers. As Pforzheimer worked to build a comprehensive collection of material relating to the British Romantic period (roughly 1790 to 1830), he eagerly sought out the work of women whose work in some way influenced, or was influenced by, Romantic literature and culture—a collecting tradition that continues to this day.

–Timothy Gress, Coordinator, Pforzheimer Collection

More information is available here»