Lit Nerd

In a Goodwill that I shop at sometimes, there is a used book store that I make a point to visit every time I'm there. Their poetry section is actually pretty good and has fairly frequent turnover, so somebody in D-ville is reading poetry, but I have yet to find these mysterious people. Yesterday,  we went there and I found an old Oxford University Press edition of William Blake. Beside it were two other OUP books: a Spenser and a Cowper. On the front endpaper of all of them, in very neat cursive fountain ink, it said "Louise Lanham University of N. C." The Blake and Cowper were dated 1931 and the Spenser was dated 1927.

I knew right away that this Louise Lanham person had to be serious about literature because of the editions of the books. Oxford University Press publishes the authoritative texts of most English writers. You and I can buy a paperback Oxford edition of, say, Byron or John Clare rather cheaply, but the blue, hardbound Oxfords are expensive. Even for a collected, not complete, edition, I don't think you could expect to pay less than $100 for a single hardbound volume today. Anyone had three Oxfords would either be a wealthy lover of literature or a  scholar.

All three of the volumes were pretty beaten up. I left the Blake and the Spenser behind because I already have Blake and Spenser at home. The Cowper (pronounced Cooper, just a heads up)  was a great find, though, since Cowper has very few readers nowadays and any affordable editions of his poetry don't include most of his work. This one includes much, if not all, of his poetry, including his masterwork, The Task.

When I got the book home, I began to look through the pages and saw that it was annotated throughout. And not just the more popular poems -- everything was annotated, sometimes very heavily. Because of Ms. Lanham's neat handwriting, I can read most of the notes and they're definitely not the work of an undergraduate or casual reader. There are lots of cross-references to Cowper's other poems or letters, line numbers when the numbers given weren't frequently enough, underlinings or bracketings of important parts, reminders to quote a line or passage, etc. Every once in a while, there is a personal note -- she points out a bad rhyme or her favorite parts of the poem. Usually, I can't stand to read people's marginalia -- not even my own, not even Coleridge's! -- but hers is intelligent, to the point, and useful. This book was a workhorse, the companion of a serious scholar. (Its frayed spine, which, unfortunately I'm going to need to tape, is also a testament to how much it was used. Oxfords are incredibly well-bound.) I concluded that Louise Lanham must have been either a grad student or professor at UNC.

I decided to google her name when I got home and, after a little searching, have found but one piece of information: she wrote "The Poetry of William Cowper and Its Relation to the English Movement," which was published by UNC Press in 1936. As far as I can tell, she was a grad student and this is either her M.A. thesis or doctoral dissertation. I'll try to find out more next time I get to the library, but for now this is all I can find over a regular search engine.

My guess is that Louise Lanham died recently and her books were donated to Goodwill. How they ended up in D-ville specifically, I don't know. Maybe she got an M.A. and came to D-ville as an English teacher. Maybe she got a Ph.D. (or an M.A., I guess) and became a professor at one of D-ville's two small colleges (one of which has been defunct since the 1970s.) All I know is that, however I ended up with this book, I'm absolutely honored to have it. I can't help but feel Louise Lanham is one of my all but forgotten foremothers. Ever since English literature became a proper college subject in the early 19th century, it's been much more welcoming to women than other disciplines. Still, I can't imagine the challenges Louise Lanham had to face as a woman while being a graduate student at a prestigious university in the late 20s and early 30s. Finding this book seems like a good omen. I'll be thinking about it (and using it!) a lot as I start grad school.

[Cross-posted, but modified here to cut out a bunch of stuff that's irrelevant to this comm.]

So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart is still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

                                                        -- Lord Byron, 1817