‘The Dr Daisy Ronco Scholarship: Exploring Women, Madness, and Disability in the Library and Archives’ - by Hannah Helm
I had the very great pleasure and privilege of visiting Gladstone’s Library on a residential retreat between 17th-24th April 2023. I was awarded the Dr Daisy Ronco Scholarship, which is given to scholars who study the 19th century with a particular emphasis on the role of women. I felt extremely lucky to receive this scholarship because I knew my research would be greatly enhanced by the huge and varied array of resources on offer at the Library, but I was also really looking forward to having an idyllic workspace to study away from all of life’s distractions!
This valuable scholarship enabled me to complete and finalise my PhD thesis, which investigates feminist, anti-sanist, and anti-ableist representations of mad and disabled women in nineteenth-century children’s literature, fairy tales, and associated visual forms (such as illustration, sculpture, and film). Using methodologies derived from Mad Studies and Literary Disability Studies, I argue that the literary works of Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and J. M. Barrie operate as sites where intersections of femininity, madness, and disability are interrogated, ultimately revealing creative and emancipatory possibilities for mad and disabled female characters.
My research specialisms thus lie in nineteenth-century and children’s literatures, with a dominant focus on the role of women who are represented as mad or disabled. During my visit, I spent the week researching in the Reading Rooms. I had never visited the Reading Rooms before and had to pinch myself once or twice: never have I studied in such a beautiful, peaceful, and inspiring environment. I had access to over three hundred sources and materials relating to nineteenth-century women and my chosen authors under study, such as Carrollian biographer Morton Cohen’s Lewis Carroll and His Illustrators: Collaborations and Correspondence, 1865-1898 (2003), which documents Carroll’s own letters from the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to his death, as well as fairy-tale scholar Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm (2012). The latter is a unique source that contains previously undiscovered fairy tales, Tatar’s own translations, and over two hundred images, which all related to my own analysis of fairy-tale literary and visual forms in the thesis. I have since incorporated findings from this work into the third chapter, which analyses representations of non-normative mothering in three popular and lesser-known tales written by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: ‘Little Snow White’, ‘Rapunzel’, and ‘The Maiden Without Hands’.
Towards the end of my visit, I benefitted from the expertise of Dr Louisa Yates (Director of Collections and Research) and Isobel Goodman (Librarian), who could not have been more accommodating or interested in my work. They sourced books and printed ephemera for me to study, such as John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), Josephine Butler’s Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture: A Series of Essays (1869), and Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Home and Politics: An Address Delivered at Toynbee Hall and Elsewhere (1888). Through access to Mill, Butler, and Fawcett’s feminist works, I was able to theorise expressions of female empowerment more fully in my own primary texts. In addition, I studied rare nineteenth-century sources about women and disability. These included Thomas Renwick’s ‘A Narrative of the Case of Miss Margaret McAvoy’ (1817), which documents experiences of female blindness, and S.A.K Strahan’s ‘Marriage and Disease’ (1892), as well as pamphlets recording anxieties about women’s suffrage (eg. Mrs. Bodichon’s ‘Reasons for and Against the Enfranchisement of Women’ (1872) and Bertrand Russell’s ‘Anti-Suffragist Anxieties’ (1910)). I was also introduced to the technological side of archival study via Reading Room Assistant, James Southerby, who showed me how to use and take notes from a microfilm reel of nineteenth-century writings.
Since completing the thesis at the Library, I am now in the process of expanding on and developing my PhD into a publishable monograph. I am looking to publish the work with Lexington Books, which has a series entitled ‘Media, Culture and the Arts’. This series focuses on the dialogue(s) between cultural expression, media, visual forms, and literature, which very much suits the interdisciplinary focus of my project, and I intend to submit the book proposal by the end of this year.
I would like to thank the librarians, archivists, and other staff at Gladstone’s Library for awarding me the Dr Daisy Ronco Scholarship and for making my stay so enjoyable and memorable. I look forward to visiting the Library again very soon!
Pictures supplied by Hannah Helm or by Isobel Goodman