Doris Lessing

Thoughts during a pandemic on Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and what ‘it’ is

October 22, 2020 - Harry Ransom Center

by JAMES ARNETT

“Why was it so hard to see while it was happening that that was what was happening?”
—URSULA K. LeGUIN, In and Out [1]

“What’s ‘it’–what do you mean by ‘it’?”
“O, anything–I mean–you know what I mean.”
—VIRGINIA WOOLF, Kew Gardens typescript

The walls have closed in in my Tennessee home. I sometimes stand up blinking from my screen and walk from room to room, unsure of what I’m looking for or doing. My corgi, Phineas Finn, is no help, certain that if I am at home I am at his service. I stand in my front window often, looking at the unchanging suburban street. I retreat to the refuge of books. [Read more…] about Thoughts during a pandemic on Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and what ‘it’ is

ABOUT JAMES ARNETT
James Arnett, PhD, is the UC Foundation Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and a former Harry Ransom Center Fellow.

Celebrating 100 years of Doris Lessing

October 22, 2019 - Harry Ransom Center

Nobel Prize–winning author Doris Lessing was born one hundred years ago, on October 22, 1919. [Read more…] about Celebrating 100 years of Doris Lessing

Commitment to collecting

December 9, 2015 - Harry Ransom Center

Going back to the origins of research libraries, there is a long history of scholars building collections to suit personal interests, constructing around themselves an athenaeum of books that supported their individual research goals.

Coleccionismo comprometido

October 21, 2015 - Harry Ransom Center

Cuando se busca en tiempo atrás los orígenes de las bibliotecas de investigación, damos con una larga historia de académicos dedicados a recabar colecciones de acuerdo a su interés personal, construyendo en torno suyo ateneos de libros que documentaran sus muy particulares metas de investigación. Y muchas veces, cuando dicho académico proseguía su carrera –en otro trabajo o en otro contexto intelectual- la colección emprendida se marchitaba, sin la mente directriz inicial que siguiera contando su historia. [Read more…] about Coleccionismo comprometido

Fellows Find: Doris Lessing correspondence deepens insight into The Grass is Singing

October 15, 2015 - Harry Ransom Center

“Have you had a look in the Knopf collection?” Rick Watson, the head of reference services at the Ransom Center, sounded casual, and I wasn’t sure I had time to take the detour he was suggesting.

I spent a month at the Ransom Center last year, working mainly with the extensive Doris Lessing archive. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: Doris Lessing correspondence deepens insight into The Grass is Singing

Acclaimed writer Ian McEwan’s archive acquired

May 15, 2014 - Alicia Dietrich

The Harry Ransom Center has acquired the archive of writer Ian McEwan (b. 1948), one of the most distinguished novelists of his generation. The archive documents McEwan’s career and includes early material from his childhood and adolescence, as well as his earliest abandoned stories dating from the late-1960s and early 1970s. The archive includes drafts of all of McEwan’s later published works including his critically acclaimed novels Amsterdam and Atonement up through On Chesil Beach and Solar.

McEwan composed his novels partly in longhand, typically in uniform green, spiral-bound notebooks, and party on the computer. After an initial draft, he would transfer the entire text to a computer, printing out multiple drafts, which he would revise further by hand. McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novel Amsterdam is represented in the archive in its earliest form as a handwritten notebook, followed by two further revised drafts. McEwan often notes details of composition in these drafts, including their completion or revision dates.

“The writer tends to forget rapidly the routes he or she discarded along the way,” McEwan said, commenting on his manuscripts. “Sometimes the path towards a finished novel takes surprising twists. It’s rarely an even development. For example, my novel Atonement started out as a science fiction story set two or three centuries into the future.”

McEwan’s archive will reside at the Ransom Center alongside the archives of many of his peers and contemporaries, including his longtime friend Julian Barnes, as well as J. M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Tom Stoppard. The McEwan materials will be accessible once processed and cataloged.

McEwan will visit Austin and speak at the university on Sept. 10.

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