I have two new developments that I hope will make it easier for people to learn about what I am writing, reading, and teaching. One is a new website at anneboydrioux.com. (The old URL will forward here.) It is now set up to feature all of my work. This means minimizing the blog, which was before the most prominent feature of my site.…
Samantha Ellis's How To Be a Heroine brought up all kinds of issues for me about how and why women read fiction. My review of it is now up at The Rumpus. "Why do we read? Besides entertainment and escape, intellectual stimulation, and exposure to a world beyond our limited experience, one of the most fundamental reasons is to gain a perspective on our own…
The manuscript is done—it just needs copy editing and proofing, and then it will be a book. But it seems there is one more major hurdle I hadn't counted on. After spending the last five years writing this book, everything now hangs upon getting permission to quote from the letters of the figures I’m writing about. Chief among them are, of course, Constance…
Last weekend in Washington, D.C., 22 Woolson scholars—or Woolites (as we call ourselves)—gathered to share their research and celebrate the Woolson Society’s twentieth anniversary. Twenty-two participants may not sound like much, but their energy and enthusiasm far exceed their numbers. As the conference organizer, I had my share of worries, but they faded in the midst of so much conviviality and strong scholarship.…
Day one of the final revisions is here. Finally, a whole day without grading, prepping for classes, or writing letters of recommendations has materialized. I have cleared my desk, leaving only my computer, a lamp, a glass of water, a framed portrait of Woolson, and the manuscript with my editor’s comments. (I’m ignoring the stacks of papers and piles of books crowding my…
Publishing online is a quite an experience for an academic. Last week I published two pieces—one I had written a couple of months ago, the other I had written very recently. The first, a review of recent biographies about J. D. Salinger and Harper Lee at the Los Angeles Review of Books, was part of my larger goal of building a reputation as…
No one introduced me to Woolson. I didn’t discover her writings in a class in college or in graduate school. I didn’t stumble upon an essay about her or find her buried in a footnote somewhere. My first encounter with her was altogether different. You could call it a fluke or maybe fate. I was a graduate student with a burning desire to know…
I’ve been in my writing cocoon for a while now. But I am happy to say that a full draft of the manuscript of my Woolson biography is complete and now in the hands of my brilliant editor, Amy Cherry at Norton. I feel an odd mixture of relief and trepidation. A tremendous weight has lifted, but I also know that there is…
My review of Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch was published last week on Electric Literature's blog, The Outlet. This is my first foray into non-academic reviewing. I had a lot of fun doing it and can't wait to do more. This book was particularly interesting because Woolson was a big fan of George Eliot's. I believe Eliot was her first and most lasting…
A recent piece in the Atlantic argues that women writers’ lack of all-supporting, all-sacrificing spouses—in the vein of Vera Nabokov—may be a missing link to help explain the lack of gender parity in the literary world today. Vera was the kind of wife who not only took care of all of the details of her family’s life (including doing all the driving—Vladimir never…