Ransom Center Magazine

Digital Collections

Making the Banned Accessible: Digitizing the Hall-Troubridge Archive 

-

by VEGA SHAH

The Ransom Center is home to the collection and papers of British author Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) and her partner, Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge (1887-1963), a sculptor and translator. The couple, being openly lesbian partners, are remembered as LGBTQ pioneers, with Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), making lesbianism more visible in English society, despite the banning of the novel in England.

The Hall-Troubridge papers have been digitized and are accessible online in a new digital collection. Explore more than 40,000 images of Hall and Troubridge’s papers, letters, and photos, that provide insight into their personal correspondence, as well as topics such as gender, politics, and spirituality.

[Read more…] about Making the Banned Accessible: Digitizing the Hall-Troubridge Archive 

ABOUT VEGA SHAH

Vega Shah is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and a senior at the University of Texas at Austin pursuing a B.A in Anthropology, a minor in Art History, and certificates in Liberal Arts Honors and Museum Studies. Her research interests include Islamic and contemporary art and equity in museum education and curation.

Sheet music composed for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within A Dream’

-

American writer, poet, editor and critic Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809. The Ransom Center’s Edgar Allan Poe collection contains several manuscript works and about 70 letters written by Poe, and works about him.

[Read more…] about Sheet music composed for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within A Dream’

The first quarter century of PEN

-

Outlined here are eight important moments that occurred during PEN’s first 25 years. All these and many others are treated in more depth and detail in the book PEN: An Illustrated History (Interlink Publishing, September 2021).

October 5, 1921
CATHARINE AMY DAWSON SCOTT, a poet and novelist who was sometimes described as “unstoppable,” hosted the inaugural dinner of the PEN Club at the Florence Restaurant in London. More than 40 writers and guests enjoyed a six-course banquet in the chandeliered splendor of the main dining room. The urbane John Galsworthy, the first president, offered the toast. “We writers are in some sort trustees for human nature,” he said. “If we are narrow and prejudiced, we harm the human race. And the better we know each other […], the greater the chance of human happiness in a world not, as yet, too happy.

[Read more…] about The first quarter century of PEN

Highlights from an unprecedented year

-

It was not the year we anticipated, hoped for, or a year we would want to repeat. The first rumblings of the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, escalated in February, and eventually erupted in our community in March when the Center closed its doors to in-person visits and staff began working remotely. What happened next was a natural shift to expanding the Center’s online presence throughout the year. [Read more…] about Highlights from an unprecedented year

Archive of The Well of Loneliness author offers a view of queer history

-

In her 2019 memoir, In The Dream House, author Carmen Maria Machado writes about the importance of seeing queer people not as saints, but as full human beings – human beings with complicated and sometimes upsetting ideologies. She writes in her essay, “Dream House as Queer Villainy,”  “…it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to…moral complexities of every kind.” [Read more…] about Archive of The Well of Loneliness author offers a view of queer history

Copyright © 2022 Harry Ransom Center

Web Accessibility · Web Privacy