Mollie Barnes opens the panel by examining the defaced manuscripts of Laura Towne’s 1862-1864 diaries. In their published form, Towne’s diaries have been used as important primary sources for the Penn School, one of the first schools in the South for formerly enslaved African Americans. When researching her first book, Barnes utilized the standard 1912 edition of Towne’s diaries edited by Rupert Holland. Upon seeing the manuscripts in person, however, Barnes was surprised—and horrified—to find them crosshatched with thick pencil lines drawn through what Holland silently discarded. Currently at work on a new critical edition of Townes’s diaries, Barnes recovers the defaced manuscripts and argues that the personal and professional, private and public, domestic and civic relationships of Towne and other women relief workers were far more complicated than previously imagined.
Nicole Lobdell continues this discussion with her research on Shelley and Mary (1882), a semi-secret proto-biography of Mary Shelley compiled and edited by her daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley. Lobdell argues that the Shelley and Mary volumes are extraordinary and methodologically troublesome because no two copies are alike. After their printing, each copy was edited differently by hand. Additional letters appear inserted in some copies, but not all; passages have been physically excised from some copies, but not others; and Lady Shelley’s marginalia can vary widely in tone and substance. Once believed to exist in only twelve copies, Lobdell’s archival research has uncovered more than thirty. Her comparative analysis reveals shocking discrepancies and silent omissions that were reproduced in Shelley biographies and scholarship for decades.
In working on an edition of British writer Jean Ingelow’s letters (1820-1897), third speaker Maura Ives discovered a subset of letters written by Ingelow’s mother, Mrs. Jean Kilgour Ingelow. Since the early twentieth century, Ingelow's reception has been damaged by representations of her mother as a strict, narrow-minded Evangelical who attempted to thwart her daughter’s career. This handful of letters, read in context of other primary sources, revises prior representations of Mrs. Ingelow. Ives argues that while Mrs. Ingelow’s letters exemplify the role letters can play in studies of literary sociability, they also underscore the gaps in Jean Ingelow’s epistolarium, highlighting the ways in which the characteristics of an epistolary corpus influence critical discourse.
Kate Phelan closes the panel by discussing archival negligence and obfuscation in representations of Irish writer Maeve Brennan. In 2004, biographer Angela Burke used Brennan’s personal archives to claim that she had stopped working in 1976 after experiencing a “mental breakdown.” In February 2026, however, Phelan discovered in the same archive detailed plotting notes and other materials suggesting that Brennan had begun work on a novel in 1977, contradicting Burke’s earlier claims. In her paper, Phelan discloses how the absence of these materials in Burke’s biography has shaped scholarship of Brennan’s literary legacy for decades, exploring the ethics of archival use and the inherent problematics in interpreting the remains of a literary life.
To varying degrees, there are always limits to what we will find in the archives, a reality that should remind scholars to tread carefully both in interpreting what they find and speculating about what is missing. We believe this panel will appeal to a wide and diverse audience and will open larger conversations about surprising archival discoveries and the ethics of archives.
Each speaker will have 12-15 minutes to present, leaving a minimum of 15 minutes for discussion. All slide decks will be preloaded on the same laptop, so there will be no time wasted between speakers.
With a presider and four speakers, the panel includes: a graduate student (Phelan), an assistant professor (Lobdell), two associate professors (Barnes and Nora Benedict, the presider), and a full professor (Ives). They represent different geographic locations (the U.S. and Ireland) and institution types (large research universities and comprehensive regional universities). There is an Americanist (Barnes), a Latin American scholar (Benedict), two scholars of British literature (Ives and Lobdell), two digital humanities scholars (Benedict and Ives), and a creative writer and Irish literary historian (Phelan). Three scholars work in the nineteenth century (Barnes, Ives, and Lobdell) and two in the twentieth century (Benedict and Phelan).