The Space in Between: Affect, the Archive, and Writing Women's Lives

Abstract:As scholars who work in literary biography, and especially as scholars who are interested in women's literary biography, many of us are used to working with fragments, ephemera, and the scraps that have somehow survived the centuries. On the one hand, it seems clear that if we want a better picture of the past (if we want a better understanding of how women lived and worked in the eighteenth century), then it is not enough to focus only on the well-known or the clearly exceptional. On the other hand, the impulse towards recovery for recovery's sake brings with it its own set of methodological challenges and assumptions. For example, much recovery is rooted in archival work—in the attempt to find and piece together the fragments of the past into a coherent account. And yet, those of us who do archival work know that the archive often actively resists coherence; it is instead filled with gaps, with incomplete traces of lives that can never be fully tracked. In other words, in writing the lives of the women of the past we need to look past recovery and reconstruction as an end in itself and begin to think productively about how we interact with and represent the archives themselves, the information they contain, and especially the gaps in the archival record. In this essay, I explore the case of Sally Wesley—the Methodist and poet—in order to suggest that archives have affects and that in order to better read them and better reconstruct women's lives, we must become more comfortable with living within these archives of feelings.