contests, Byron and governesses

The contest winners from my newsletter contest are: Caroline and Lois. I have contacted them privately . Many thanks to everyone who entered.

I have finished reading Other People's Daughters. While interesting, it did not give me as much of a background about governesses as the Victorian Governess did. It did however explore the life of Claire Clairmont, the woman who seduced Byron and lived in a complicated menage a trois with Shelley and her step-sister Mary. Clairmont bore Byron a child -- Allegra who died of a childhood illness. Bryon comes across as rather a misogynist pig and utterly selfish. Mad, bad and dangerous to know can certainly be applied to him in this instance. And I did find it ironic that he did not hold much store by an educated woman and yet his daughter Ada was such a brilliant mathematician.
Clairmont had an eventful early life to say the least. While she is waiting for her legacy from Shelley's estate, she ends up as governess. However such was the notoriety of the family that even in Russia, she had difficulty and lost lucrative positions.
I suspect that some of the problems for women of that era and class was that there was no other real option. What was possible in the 18th century became closed to them. And do not get me started on the lack of life insurance or the Married Women's Property Acts. Or how they were expected to provide for their brothers and rarely do the brothers appear to have come through.
The problem with studying the governess is that really there is not much primary source material. It is interesting that much of the governess literature revolves around the governess as Cinderella.
Anyway, I now have a good handle on the governess as an institution. Its myths and mythologies as well as its grim realities.

Archiving

There is an article in the RWR this month about the importance of archiving. Of saving things. Apparently some day, someone might want to study an author's work and how they develop ideas.
Jennifer Blake contributed to the article and also pointed out that it can be helpful for the author. For example, she thought her method had changed but then she went back to her old ms and discovered that she did as much rewriting as ever.
My problem is lack of storage space. I can not keep all the physical copies. I do keep my black moleskines which have my early thoughts. (Currently with my room having been changed around, my latest notebook has gone AWOL -- most disconcerting. ) And I do keep my electronic copies. But I do not tend to keep my revised scribbled on copies. I suppose it would be useful to see how ideas develop...but I guess I am only a demi-pack rat. After awhile, I do like a good clear out.
The article was interesting as it did point out that even though the author may save to disk, diskette or what have you, the nature of technology has changed and there is much that can no longer be easily accessed. The article recommends -- opening up all your files when you get a new computer and making sure...
Other things to think about saving include -- reader letters, correspondence from your editor, newspaper articles and the like. Badges from conferences. Some of these things get saved and some are just clutter.
But when does clutter become important to researchers?
I still remember the conversation with one author who used to look after the Byron archives, they had even saved his slippers.
I do not think that I will ever rise to that height. And most of the time, I am not even aware of my own thought processes. If I thought about why I changed a word to another one, I would not be able to write.
It was Browning who once said --God and Browning once knew the true meaning of that poem, and now God knows.
But I suspect that I should get more methodical about saving things. Now if I could just find that moleskine, I would know how the next part of the story should go...