Nancy Kushigian

Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period rests solidly and soundly on the work of the women who wrote these volumes of poetry. The experience of discovering and enjoying their poems has motivated and driven this project. Many bibliographers, librarians, and scholars have had the wisdom and audacity, over the years, to preserve and document these poetic texts and the biographical facts that we have about the lives of the poets. This process continues. In all probability, there are poets and their volumes that remain yet to be "discovered and uncovered" from small or private collections, or from the shelves of booksellers. Thanks however to the work of bibliographer J. R. De Jackson (Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835), it is possible to undertake a project such as this with great confidence that a vast majority of those volumes of poetry by women of the period that are cataloged in major British and American libraries, have been documented. Jackson's bibliography rests in turn on the published catalogs and bibliographies of major research libraries. We have begun with Jackson's work, and turned as well to these other sources for biographical and bibliographical materials. We have also relied heavily upon the work of Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements. (The Feminist Companion to Literature in English) and on Janet Todd, whose bibliographical work on women writers will always be central. These and other sources are listed in our secondary bibliography.

The greatest obstacles for one who would endeavor to create electronic transcriptions of these texts by Scottish women poets are the same as those that confront the scholar and teacher: their rarity, and their dispersal over libraries throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. About half of the volumes in Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period were sourced by Alexander Street Press from repositories throughout North America and Great Britain. Twenty-eight of the texts were scanned and encoded as part of the British Women Romantic Poets Project, based on the Kohler Collection of English Poetry here at the University of California, Davis Library. The Kohler Collection consists of over 14,000 volumes published in Great Britain, Wales and Ireland between 1789 and 1918. The collection includes known and unknown poets, private and commercially published volumes of well known and, as yet, little known titles. The volumes were gathered by the English bookseller C. C. Kohler and cataloged by Michele Kohler. In 1983, the Library at the University of California, Davis purchased the collection, and published collection catalogs.

In January of 1997, preservation specialist Charlotte Payne and I began a pilot project with the library's Kohler Collection, to see whether it was feasible to convert these texts to electronic formats, thus making them accessible to students and scholars over the internet. Widespread favorable response to the Victorian Women Writers' Project at Indiana and the Women Writers Project at Brown pointed to the pedagogical usefulness of electronic texts, particularly when TEI-encoded with attention to structure and accurate transcription. Our own Davis academic community reaffirmed our belief that such a collection would be useful. Davis students and faculty members Monica Kearney, Jane King, Kari Lokke, and Adriana Craciun presented papers based on Kohler Collection research at the Sixth Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Conference, held on the Davis campus in March 1997. Their work and interest in the Kohler, were, we believed, indicative of a larger group of scholars who would benefit by greater access to poetic texts by British women poets of the Romantic Period.

We assembled an advisory board of major scholars in the field of romantic and gender studies, whose input has shaped our thinking about the project throughout. Several of the contributors to our current volume are drawn from this advisory board. British Women Romantic Poets was supported by research funds from the Librarian's Association of the University of California, and by University Librarian Marilyn Sharrow. It could not have existed without the unfailing and ongoing nurture and support of Dr. Clinton Howard. Many many students contributed skilled attention to the project. In particular, Leigh Rios and Rianna Au have made major contributions. To all of these board members and library partners, I offer my deepest gratitude.

Most of all however, I want to thank my co-editors Stephen Behrendt and Charlotte Payne. Stephen "took on" an academic project both unusual and, for practitioners of conventional printed scholarship, just a bit uncomfortable in its "virtual" nature. He has been entirely responsible for the critical narratives that we include here, and has contributed an Introduction that constitutes the first in-depth critical essay on Scottish women poets of the Romantic period to be published anywhere. Stephen solicited, selected, and edited our biographical and critical introductions. Charlotte Payne has managed the entire British Women Romantic Poets project from its inception in 1996. Her professional skills in the area of digital preservation, textual editing and encoding, and project management have been central and essential. Her efforts have been prodigious. She has maintained a sense of humor in the midst of too many macro's and too many deadlines. To these two "co-conspirators," I offer my deepest gratitude and respect. This has truly been a collaborative effort.

Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period is more than an electronic archive. It moves beyond current online library and commercial "products" in its attempt to create a full-scale "electronic critical archive-anthology." To take this step, it was necessary to find a publisher willing to coordinate the effort, to source volumes from other libraries, to create an indexing mechanism and a search interface, and to host and support continued electronic access. Alexander Street Press shared our editorial vision: to create an electronic genre that put our electronic texts into a form usable to students and scholars, to integrate text, bibliography, and critical context within one "package," and to seek the continued input of scholars as we revise, update, and expand the product over time. The beauty of the electronic medium is its flexibility. Our publishers have had the vision to work collaboratively with us to create a work that draws both on traditional scholarly sources and that uses new technologies to make available to students and scholars this continually evolving body of rare material within its historical and bibliographical contexts.

Nancy Kushigian, October 30, 2001

Additional Comments and Acknowledgements:

Stephen C. Behrendt

In her Preface and Acknowledgments Nancy Kushigian has said most of what needs saying about the genesis and evolution of Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period. Her initiative and expertise in digital librarianship in the Humanities has been the cornerstone of the whole project, and though her modesty deters her from saying so herself, there is no question that this project would never have happened without either that initiative or that expertise. We have been gratified throughout our work to have the support of Nancy's colleagues and students at the University of California, Davis, as well as (it must not go without saying) the support of forward-thinking administrators at Davis like Clinton Howard, who recognized the project's potential, not just for students and scholars but also for libraries and librarians in this increasingly electronic and technological age. Moreover, we have been fortunate to find in Alexander Street Press a publisher that shares our vision of a research archive that is not static in nature but rather dynamic, that will grow and evolve as students and scholars worldwide learn more - and share more - about the poets and their works that form the core of this archive. For my part, it has been both a pleasure and a challenge to participate in this project, during the course of which I have necessarily learned more about both Scots women's poetry of the Romantic period and about the technology that informs our project. I have also had the rare opportunity to work with wonderful colleagues, many of whom I still know only by their work (including their contributions to the archive), by their email correspondence, by their enthusiasm for this joint enterprise, and by their remarkable good will. To all of these, and to the many who likewise expressed their enthusiasm even when they found themselves unable to participate directly, I offer my own sincere thanks.

Our many contributors have worked long and hard to provide us with new introductions to the works of the poets whose volumes appear here. Their work has entailed traditional literary and cultural analysis, of course, but it has often involved also a good deal of detective work. For because the names and works of many of our poets are unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers, our contributors' efforts to recover them has frequently meant working in an almost complete absence of biographical and literary-critical resources. For some of the poets, we know neither birth nor death dates, nor anything substantive about their lives and writings other than what can be gleaned from the internal evidence of their own volumes. For others, we have only the scanty and often unreliable evidence of reviews of their works that appeared in the press during their own times, reviews that more often than not reflect the tastes and biases of the reviewers rather than any objective and informed assessment of the poetry and its authors. For still others, there exists a paper trail of sorts in the manuscripts, letters, diaries, and other documents penned by them or — more often — their acquaintances. While there is of course a sometimes substantial body of secondary interpretive literature for some poets (like Anne Macvicar Grant or Anne Bannerman or Janet Little), for others (like Richmond Inglis, Margaret Chalmers, or Christian Milne) there is virtually nothing to go on but a name and a text. In many cases, therefore, the critical essays that appear in Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period constitute the only introductions to — and discussions of — their work.

Nevertheless, this archive represents not a "completed" project but rather a work-in-progress. All of us who have contributed in one way or another have done so with the understanding that our individual efforts are part of a larger collective effort to assemble a group of related primary texts and an array of critical, biographical, bibliographical, and other apparatus that will — we all hope — shed light upon one another and upon other texts that are not present here. Having all this material together in a single, evolving archive will enable others to revisit these primary and secondary materials and to discover and explore literary and cultural relationships that might otherwise be invisible among texts that have heretofore been widely scattered in research libraries and archives around the world. Seen in its proper context, Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, then, is part of an ongoing international project to rewrite what we know — or think we know — about the nature and scope of a phenomenon called "Romanticism" that is in reality many phenomena. In recovering and reassessing the minutiae of these phenomena we shall all find ourselves continually assembling and revising new pictures, becoming ever more aware both of the many differences among the constituent fibers and of the new and perhaps previously unsuspected designs that emerge when those fibers are woven in ways in which they might actually have been some two centuries ago.

One word about the nature and scope of Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period. We have not, of course, attempted to include in this archive every poetic work published by every Scottish woman of the period. We have, for example, generally opted to include only one edition of poems that appeared in multiple editions, and we have been selective about what we have included from authors who published multiple books. In this, too, we have been guided by our desire to assemble an archive that is also a gateway. The critical introductions to individual poets, however, attempt to be more inclusive, so that there is generally some account even of primary works not included here. Furthermore, we have elected to be more — rather than less — inclusive in our criteria for selection. Thus, as noted in the General Introduction, we have included poets like Susanna Blamire, who is not technically "Scottish" but whose geographical location and subject matter aligns her closely with other poets who are. And we have expanded our chronological parameters as well, especially to include poets with relatively early birth dates, in part because many of our poets lived to far more advanced ages than did their male contemporaries. Our goal has been to gather in one location a large body of poetry and secondary materials that will facilitate the further scholarship that will carry this project forward.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Nancy Kushigian, with whom it has been a joy and a privilege to work on this project. Her vision in conceiving and developing it have been inspirational, and her skill in marshaling the many details of texts, technology, and personnel involved in an enterprise of this magnitude has been nothing short of remarkable. For her kindness, generosity, patience, and unfailing good will throughout the course of our work, I am enormously grateful.

Stephen C. Behrendt, October 30, 2001