Unpublished Articles

Before the internet, the way to get your ideas into the world was to publish books or articles. The number of journals that published academic work in 1987 was considerably fewer than the current estimate of 30,000 academic journals globally.¹ Publishing was intensely competitive, and my husband and I believed that it was not so much the quality of the article but rather the people you knew. This may have been a dysfunctional perception. However, the struggles to get something published were real, and I document the experiences of failure that we had. This is an austere post without pictures and a fitting end to my least favorite term at Oxford.

The Pound, Eliot, Panofsky Article

The article that I was writing, called “Pound, Eliot, and Panofsky: The Melancholy Fire Sermon,” was destined for oblivion. As I explained to my husband, Cyrena Pondrom from the University of Wisconsin English Department read it and said “I should add about four or five more pages if I can. It is presently ten pages long. I think I can probably add three; I don’t think I can manage five. It depends on what I find at the British Library. So, as soon as I make a trip to the British Library, I plan to finish that article and send it out (while I am here at Oxford) to American Literature, which is where she recommended. I haven’t quite decided whether to have John Bayley [my Oxford supervisor] look at it and recommend a place. On one hand, I think it would be nice to get his recommendation of what would be a good place to publish it. On the other hand, I am a little concerned that if I show him this article he might think that I’m not working on my dissertation like I should be. And he might start asking questions about when am I going to show him some work. So, I guess I am not going to show it to him. . . . I will try to get it accepted for publication. If they don’t accept it for publication and it comes back to me, which will take at least a couple months, I might get his suggestion if the first try fails.”

A week later, things had changed. “I went to the lecture on Monday about using the British Library Manuscript collection. And I found out that, yes, you do have to have a letter from your supervisor to use the collection. I wanted to use it very badly to take a look at the T. S. Eliot letter that he wrote when he was in Marburg in 1920 having a nervous breakdown because I wanted to incorporate it into my article. . . . So in order to give justification for why I wanted to use the manuscript collection, I had to send Bayley a copy of the article that I was working on and tell him that’s why I wanted permission to use the collection. I also asked him to comment on it and if he thought it was publishable and where would he suggest that I send it. . . . I got a note back from him today. He signed my permission for the Ashmolean Library, which I also needed permission to use as well. Here is his card, which I will read to you: ‘I enjoyed the article very much and, yes, I do think it is publishable. Have you thought of Essays in Criticism? (We will discuss.) I enclose the library form.’” Notwithstanding these two suggestions, the article was never published. I no longer have a copy of it.

The Robert Everard and General Baptist Articles

My husband was writing several articles on seventeenth-century religious radicals, including one about a Leveller named Robert Everard, which he was planning to submit to the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. He had sent drafts of two articles to Geoffrey Nuttall, a prominent UK religious historian, to review. In response to what my husband told me about Nuttall’s letter, I said:

“I think it’s very puzzling that he would originally say that he thought the article had been accepted for publication, then subsequently say that he didn’t think it was unpublishable. Are you sure that he wasn’t referring to the Everard article rather than the General Baptist article? Maybe he was confused. The other thing is that in my personal editorial opinion, I think the Everard article is better than the General Baptist article. I think they are both publishable and I have always encouraged you to send the General Baptist one out again for consideration by someone else. We both know it was almost published, and maybe would have been published, if you had had an academic position. So I hope you don’t give up on sending the General Baptist one out just because of the comments of Nuttall, and I certainly hope you don’t abandon the Everard article, which I frankly did not see any stylistic problems with.

The thing that is so annoying is that I read so many poorly written things. In the Olney manuscript, which was a collection of thirty or so articles that appeared in the Southern Review, I would say that two-thirds of them were not as well written as either of your pieces. So, I am not sure why he said that, but I certainly wouldn’t let his judgment be the last word on the subject.

I am a little curious. Is it possible that Nuttall didn’t expect [the English Tutor at Keble] to show those four pages to you? Maybe he didn’t really intend for you to see them. Maybe he doesn’t know that you have seen them. I had a reasonably long conversation with [the English Tutor] last Friday at the Tutor for Graduates party, and I mentioned to him that I got the impression that Nuttall had not liked the Everard piece as much as the earlier one. First of all, he said he hadn’t been in contact with Nuttall since last summer, and second, that he would take that as a compliment. If anything, it meant that Nuttall felt comfortable enough with you that he could be somewhat critical—that you shouldn’t take it in any way personally. I got the impression that Nuttall thrives on a degree of lively controversy. I don’t think that there is anything going on between them. Maybe Nuttall is not senile after all but just playing the Devil’s advocate. . . . I wouldn’t get too depressed about it.”

Neither article was published; however, the Tutor for English at Keble, who also reviewed the article, included a discussion of Everard in his 1994 book on literature and revolution in England in the seventeenth century.

End of Michaelmas Term

Earlier in the term, I had decided that I wanted to leave Oxford while I was pregnant, but I was caught up in various university regulations.

“I think I have a plan that will work. . . . I found out definitively from the graduate office that the minimum number of terms that I have to be in residence to get my D.Phil. is six terms. There is a requirement that I have to be resident in Oxford every term that I hold a probationary status. Now this present term, Michaelmas [1987], is the last term that I will have probationary status because as of November 23rd I was transferred to full M.Litt. status, which means that I don’t have to be in Oxford after that point. It also states in the Regulations that during any academic year, you can be absent for one of the three terms, provided that you spend 45 days in Oxford sometime before the start of the following academic year. So, my plan is this—to come home as soon term ends on December 5th and stay in Madison until the end April, which means that I would miss the second term in Oxford; however, I would return for the third term [after the baby was born] . . . which means I would be free to leave Oxford around the second week of July.”

At the end of term, I packed two large suitcases. The problem was how to get them downstairs and into the taxi. I confided about my condition to one of the new students, James Robertson. He was close to my age and working on a Law degree. In other circumstances, we would have been good friends. He carried the suitcases down for me and waved goodbye.

This is the last newsletter for Michaelmas term. We will reconvene at the start of Hilary term in the new year. Happy Holiday!

1. Zul M., “How Many Academic Journals Are There in the World?” PublishingState.com, October 23, 2021.