Postcards

In keeping with the theme of the conference, we asked speakers to send us a postcard of their choice, featuring a few brief words about their paper, and anything else that came to mind. We were overwhelmed by the response!

Ashley Walker from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Penelope’s postal problem (above)

Gwyneth Jones, Open University, quotes a letter from Fanny Imlay to her half-sister Mary Shelley (below)

Isabelle Parsons on a sci-fi classic (above).

‘An epistolary habit is hard to shake.’ Robyn Marsack, writing from Glasgow, quotes Michael Schmidt (below)

Carmen Gómez-Galisteo tells us that Louisa May Alcott signed off her letters with ‘Yours for reform of all kinds’ (below)

Naomi Walker quotes from one of Jane Austen’s final letters (below)

Stella Halkyard writes from rainy Manchester (below). Edwin Morgan’s letters are stored in the Carcanet archive, on which Stella will be presenting at the conference.

Nadia Georgiou finds the sun shining on Derbyshire (above), while Kim Wiltshire prepares to read Strangers on a Train (below)

Silvina Katz on the challenge of researching Silvina Ocampo, who described herself as ‘like the animals who hide what they love most.’ (above)

Below, Roberta Zanasi quotes from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, on the moment of posting a letter: ‘It was gone from me like life, never to be recalled.’

A beautifully crafted postcard from Mark Borthwick, in Edinburgh, ‘sipping homemade kombucha and delighted’! (below)

‘Give me Whitman!’ Jennifer Burek Pierce, writing from Bloomington, Indianapolis, quotes poet Mary Ellen Solt (above).

Maya Haidar, of Sorbonne Université, writes to us in advance of her paper on Emily Eden and Toru Dutt. The drawing, by Samir Biswas, shows the Victoria Memorial Hall, in Kolkata.

We received three beautiful postcards from Ayşe Nur Öğüt. The first (below) is from the SALT archive (Salt Research, Said Bey Archive – see here for full reference). The quotation on the reverse is from the novel Kiralık Konak (The Mansion for Rent, 1922) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu.