Following up on our conversation about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” I wanted to share with you this important recent discovery. Long thought lost, the earliest poems by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—an African-American woman writer writing before the Civil war—were just found and authenticated by a researcher.
If you’re interested in African-American literature, women’s writing, or early nineteenth-century poetry, I encourage you to check out this link, which generously provides scans of Watkins Harper’s collection (scroll down to the bottom). You may see commonalities with Barrett Browning’s work, but it’s mostly important, I think, to consider the actual voice of one of EBB’s African-American contemporaries alongside her assumption (even appropriation) of that voice.
The story of the poems’ recovery also provides a good lesson. A graduate student, having read in secondary sources that this collection of poems was lost, decided to check an archive’s library catalog just in case—and the poems were there! In other words, many distinguished scholars had somehow missed what was hiding in plain sight. A good reminder that, even if you’re starting out, you can make significant advances in scholarship.
1 comments
Professor,
This is an interesting find as well as entertaining. I just had a chance to see this post so I’m late to say congratulations and good job to Johanna. It’s really interesting and inspirational to the novice in their careers to know that even the novice can, indeed, become the expert – and surpass the experts – when a little organizational skill is combined with investigative skill. It’s very interesting and entertaining to be able to analyze the pamphlet. I would like to point the entertaining part out this: Ellen Watkins Harper is written on the front page. I think this was an oopsie moment for the experts when corresponding the author to her work is more challenging than deciphering 7th century text.
I think this is best summed by what District Attorney Arthur Branch said to Assistant DA Jack Mccoy in the television show Law and Order: “This is not mathematics, Jack.” “If everyone of these cases could be prosecuted by applying some equation and a book then you couldn’t get me out of bed in the morning.” “You know one day this chair is going to be empty.”
The last line to this quote is excellent for this situation as maybe now they’ll promote the novice to a supervisory position of the experts or something of that sort.