Last week I took my first jab at researching some of these women in the club. I found the work incredibly meticulous and overall frustrating. I felt like I was sifting through virtual piles of forgotten texts and coming up empty-handed. Yet when I finished the assignment I felt like I really was not finished at all. I was ready to keep going, it is cheesy but the more I found about these women, the more questions I had.

L. R. Cautley or Lucy Randolph Cautley was pretty active within the club. She shared lots of articles throughout her time as a member. They seemed to be short stories and essays never published. What I did find online of hers was sparse in comparison to the amount she shared at club meetings. Cautley had a fascination with Rudyard Kipling, the author of the Jungle Book. She shared with the club a few things she wrote about his work and in 1901 had an essay about his work published. This seemed to be the most notable thing she had ever published. Although she was not known for poetry, she did have a poem published in Harper’s Monthly. The only other things I could find on her were three copyrights of dramas with authorship by her. I could not find any text on them, if they were ever performed, or sold, or any other reason which would draw her to want to copyright them. I hope to solve that mystery in my second phase of research on her.

Mrs. James Casey Coale really frustrated me in research. I only found she was mentioned in the minutes as presenting two of her published books to the club to keep in their library. She was not an official member of the club as far as I could tell. Her book The Cottage by the Sea was insanely easy to find. But the other book seems to have never existed, and maybe for a good reason, it was titled Leila the Hindoo Girl, so I can only imagine the type of material it contained. I think what I found most frustrating about Coale was that she exclusively goes her husband’s name, but her husband can not be found anywhere! Hopefully in phase two of the research I can find out who Mr. James Casey Coale was and thus, find out more about who the Mrs. was.

Virginia Woodward Cloud was an extremely active member inside and out the club. She was a popular poet whose poems are still popping up in recent anthologies and/or reprints. It is very refreshing to me that people have held on to Cloud’s poetry and continue to make her selections available online. I am excited to start reading some of her works and uncover some forgotten ones. Also, she seemed to be a very well-liked woman within the club. Since she was a bit more revered than other women at the time, I hope this allows for me to find out more about her aspects of life through research.