Women's History Review (original) (raw)

This discussion explores some of the ways in which historical narratives can emerge from gaps in the evidence and in our ways of thinking about the past, with reference to the writer, feminist activist and Shakespearean scholar, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841-1929). A considerable body of manuscript and other archival material relating to the Stopes family is held in public hands. However, key items, including Charlotte Stopes's own correspondence with prominent people of her time, have been lost or destroyed. This article aims to address the tensions between private and public aspects of Stopes's life as a way of exploring ways in which the absence, as well as the presence, of evidence can influence historical accounts. As the discussion sets out to show with reference to Stopes, historical attention may be drawn to certain kinds of evidence in accordance with dominant cultural narratives, allowing these narratives to be repeatedly rehearsed across generations of scholarship. This process may then produce a discursive gap, a failure to recognize marginal or unfashionable contributions to public culture, which in turn produces distortions in the record of the past. As researchers, historians, biographers and writers, we work with the evidence we gather about our subjects through books, manuscripts, images, ephemera and objects of various kinds; often through repeated visits to a library, museum, archive or personal collection. Even as a by-product of research, these entities of knowledge can be irresistible: a worn fragment of soap kept in a wooden box, the flair and density of handwriting in ink, or a rare bound volume which always opens at a certain yellowed page. The impression of intimacy that the researcher gleans from these materials can create a sense of relationship with the subject; a glimpse of what Jorge Luis Borges described as the 'extravagant joy' of a belief in the possibility of a complete body of knowledge, a whole story, a whole life. 1 As I will suggest in this article, however, it may be within the gaps and absences of public and historical record, the incomplete manuscript, missing photograph, lost or censored personal correspondence, or amongst forgotten and unpopular themes and figures, that some of the most fruitful territory for historical writing and research can be found. As Carolyn Steedman observes, the archival historian must, in part, 'read for what is not there: the silence and the absences of the documents always speak to us'. 2 As this article