With the rush of finals and end-of-semester faculty meetings, I’ve neglected posting some of the final updates from our class this semester. What prompts me to post today is that the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore Wikipedia page is live! I was notified this morning:

This page was months in the making—just getting Wikipedia to approve the entry took nearly two months of revision and waiting (mostly waiting). And it is our first outside recognition of the Club’s historical significance. Huzzah!

The Wikipedia entry is based on the Club history that Cynthia wrote up in January, with some nips and tucks from me based on feedback from Wikipedia as well as a few additions to indicate the literary significance of the Club as well as its political leanings (segregated; ambivalent about suffrage). But most of the work is Cynthia’s, so congrats to her!

Other milestones and achievements:

The WLCB archive site has undergone a major revision, with a revised homepage (with archival images discovered this semester), a spiffy new membership map created by Clara Love using the Carto mapping platform and incorporating biographies and pictures collected and written by everyone in the class, and an elegantly written introduction to the site’s Virtual Library by Katie Kazmierski (or Katie Kaz, as she became known to all of us).

We completed selecting works for Parole Femine: The Words and Lives of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore, which will include writings by nearly 40 Club members, including poetry, short fiction, excerpts from novels, newspaper columns, historical works, and translations. The book still needs to be edited, which will happen next year, with publication slated for fall 2019. But the cover of the book has been designed—beautifully so—by Ellen Roussel.

And we had our Salon! We recorded the entire thing on Facebook Live (you can view the video without a Facebook account). We invited faculty from the department, folks from the Library, and friends and roommates– over forty people came in all– and shared readings, introductory headnotes that will be published in Parole Femine, and the kind of hospitality always offered by the Club to its guests: tea, cookies, and other comestibles. It was a lot of fun, and amazing to see all of the work from the past year come together in live performance (with period costumes, to boot).

Here’s the program (designed beautifully–as always!–by Megan Hultberg, based on actual programs used by the Club):

This semester was a pretty crazy ride, and I can’t say I’m not glad it’s over. But the work continues: I’m working with Marina this summer and fall to correct errors on the archive site and also to continue preparing Parole Femine for publication, and I’ll be presenting on the class’s work at several conferences this fall. And next spring, a new team–including a few returning members of this past semester’s class, I hope– will be editing the rather large volume we’ve put together this semester, in a new class I’m developing, EN 344 Book, Edition, Archive.

Posts in this space are likely to become few and far between over the next few months, but Marina and I will continue to share discoveries as we come across them. Enjoy the summer, everyone!