Category: General Info

State of the Project, September 2022

The header of a Contents page from an early edition of The Female Quixote, black print on beige paper.

My apologies for the lateness of this update, as it is very nearly October! I know, however, that my few regular readers will forgive my tardiness. Luckily no one sets their calendar by my updates. 🙂

The month of September is nearly always a month of “festina lente,” as my high school science teacher Mrs. Freese used to say — translated from Latin as either “hasten slowly” or “hurry up and wait,” with the latter being closer to my own experience. The semester starts in earnest, paperwork is in dire need of getting done, the spring semester suddenly has to be settled, and then whoosh, toward the end there’s a chance to breathe again.

I have made some progress this month, hitting that middle space between “not as much as I’d wanted” and “none at all.” I continued entering gathered data into the core spreadsheet, finishing with Henrietta and continuing on through Hermione (possibly misattributed though it may be), The History of the Marquess of Lussan and Isabella, issues of The Lady’s Museum, and The Memoirs for the History of Madame de Maintenon. To this website I’ve added the maps for The Greek Theatre of Father Brumoy and the aforementioned Maintenon title. I am still working on transcribing the data I got at Penn State (and that was a fantastic trip, let me tell you — I finished up with everything I had access to in exactly the time I had to be there, which is something of a minor miracle in itself), but I’ve made great progress on determining what data I’m collecting and what I’m not as interested in. I hope by the end of the year to offer up a sample of that from one of the books I studied.

Next month will probably be slower than this one in terms of overall progress — midterms are never very forgiving of time spent away from grading, and that’s especially true for the classes I’m teaching this semester. That being said, I’m pushing forward as much as I can. I need to get the entries squared away so I can start looking at other fellowship applications for libraries. Now that’s exciting. 🙂

State of the Project, June 2022

Oh, dear Readers, it has been an incredibly busy month. First of all, let me direct your attention to the picture on the right, which was only one of the amazing books I got to squee over and learn from at the RBS session on The History of the Book in America, 1700-1830, held at the Library Company of Philadelphia and taught by the excellent scholar James Green, who is Librarian Emeritus at that institution.

During that week, I learned very little about Lennox directly, but a ton about printing in the early United States and how her books likely came to be in the US. It opened so many avenues in my future research that I had not even considered, and I’m absolutely thrilled that I went. I should state that I was pleased to attend via a William T. Buice Scholarship, courtesy of UVa’s Rare Books School. I encourage anyone who’s interested, particularly NTT or independent scholars, to apply and help defray the tuition and fees involved with attending.

Aside from the RBS course, I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve completed Phase 1.1 of the LBP! Phase 1.1 refers to the gathering of raw location data of extant copies of Lennox’s published work, recorded through Google maps and added to the Maps page on this site. The data now gets downloaded and converted to a .csv format, and then aggregated so I can check individual libraries for their actual holdings and eliminate any digital access copies that snuck in, or add material that got missed.

Once I’ve cleaned up and verified the data, then I’ll move on to analysis and remapping. At the same time, I’ll take on Phase 2, which is determining the data types I’m collecting and what I want the overall schema of the project to be. This section includes longevity planning, scalability, UI design and parameters, and a potential push for a sharable bibliographic interface that can be tweaked for use in other projects free of charge. I don’t anticipate starting Phase 2 before 2023, and I likely won’t be doing any serious data gathering on the books themselves until nearly 2024, though I’d be happy to be overestimating the timeline here.

All in all, I’m very excited about progress this summer and what next month brings. Stay tuned!

A hand-embroidered cover on a Bible dated to 1743, belonging to Mary Sandwith. It's red, green, blue, and yellow on a cream background using flamestitch.
Mary Sandwith’s Bible, from 1743. She embroidered this cover as a girl — the date she stitched on the spine is from when she was 11 years old. Part of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s collections.

Cool Discovery of the Day, Issue #1

Title page of a 1758 book titled "Angellica: a Comedy in Two Acts".

As I was browsing my way through the Penn State library website to determine what they had there that I’d need to use, I ran across an electronic copy of the work whose title page is featured here: Angelica; or Quixote in Petticoats, a Comedy in Two Acts. This 1758 play was not written by Charlotte Lennox, though there’s a note at the end of the dedication noting that they took Angelica (originally Arabella) and most of the plot wholesale from The Female Quixote by “Mrs. Lenox.” Nice to give credit for that much, at least, and it speaks to the contemporary popularity of the novel that it inspired this knock-off play.

Welcome!

This is the inaugural post for the Descriptive Bibliography of Charlotte Lennox. This project is still in its nascent stages, but to my mind that presents an opportunity seldom available: a chance to not only undertake a significant project (of a massive scope for one person, let’s be honest), but to create a public record of how and where and with what tools I’m trying to put it all together.

My goal is to eventually create an open-access, online, digitally born descriptive bibliography for the works of Charlotte Lennox. This blog will serve as the first markers on the virtual landscape, as it were, while I determine the scope, outline the plans, accumulate the materials, build the interface, and provide the interpretations of the eventual data. This project is a long time in the works even to this point, and it will be an even longer time until it’s completed. That being said, I believe it will be a worthwhile resource for scholars — not just because it provides an archive of Lennox’s life’s work and the materiality of those resulting publications, but because it stands to greatly expand out knowledge of what bibliography means in a world where scholarship is as much digital as analog.

In future posts, I plan to break down the stages of this project, the tools and methodologies I’m applying, the approach and rationale I’m using, and the early data I’ve accumulated (as well as the gaps therein), as well as a window into where things will go from here. I’m implementing a metadata tagging system within the blog so it’ll be easier to find relevant posts in the future by subject or reference. I’ll also be including images where useful, though it won’t be my primary focus.

In the end, I hope this blog (as well as the final project) will be useful to potential readers, if only as a record of how to climb the proverbial mountain one step at a time. I hope you’ll consider joining me on this journey. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

About the Lennox Bibliography Project

Charlotte Lennox (nÊe Ramsay)
by Henry Richard Cook, after Sir Joshua Reynolds
stipple engraving, published circa 1793
NPG D14541
Š National Portrait Gallery, London

The Charlotte Lennox Bibliography Project is planned to be an open-source born-digital descriptive bibliography that focuses on the work of Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804). Charlotte Lennox was one of the most famous women authors of her day; she wrote poetry, novels, plays, and essays, translated works on political science and history, classical theater, and published a periodical specifically aimed at women. Her proto-feminist leanings are clear with her focus on women’s education, intelligence, self-sufficiency, and potential. While there has been a rediscovery of her work and resurgence of interest in her novels, the scope of her creative efforts and breadth of contemporary interest in her publications, whether as author or translator, has remained largely invisible. This project seeks to remedy that and provide a source for future scholars of Lennox’s publications.

This blog serves as the public-facing starting point for this project, which will be an ongoing concern completed in stages. The first step, Stage 1, is determining the location of extant copies of her work published between 1747-1850, when interest in reprinting Lennox’s work decreased significantly. Stage 2 will focus on both examining copies and building an archive from the data gained, as well as determining the parameters for the online interface. Stage 3 will focus on the collation and interpretation of that data. The goal is to continually add to and update the bibliography over time so that usable information is available as soon as possible, even if the whole of the data is not yet complete.

The author of this project, Michelle Lyons-McFarland, is currently a full-time lecturer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, teaching professional and technical communication for engineers. She received her Ph.D. in 2018 from Case Western Reserve University, with research focuses in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Composition. In addition to teaching, Michelle is a tech editor for Digital Defoe, the online annual journal of The Defoe Society, and acted as a reviewer for the Year’s Work in English Studies from Oxford UP from 2019-2021.