3:49 p.m., Aug. 10, 2009----This summer, the National Endowment for the Humanities supported a seminar on “The Decadent 1890s: English Literary Culture and the Fin de Siècle,” and two special guests came from the University of Delaware.

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Organized by Joseph Bristow, a professor of English at the University of California at Los Angeles, the seminar was designed for a group of college-level faculty from all over the country and Canada and was held at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, and Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the University of Delaware Library, were the only two scholars invited to lecture to the group.

“We were honored to be asked to speak and to take part in the seminar,” Stetz said of their talks on July 20.

Samuels Lasner's talk was entitled “Oscar Gives Himself Away: Reading Wilde's Presentation Copies.” Samuels Lasner has assembled a major collection of British literature and art from 1850-1900: the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, which is housed in UD's Morris Library and includes the largest privately owned group of Wilde's presentation copies - books that he gave to others.

The books were inscribed to authors, artists, actresses, family members, lovers and friends. In his talk, Samuels Lasner pointed out that some books were given for self-promotion, others to influence those in the theatre, many as thank you gifts and several to the people he most cared about, including his wife, Constance, his mother, and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

“Wilde also cherished books that were given to him,” Samuels Lasner said. “The inscriptions provide valuable insights into Wilde's life, but not much attention has been paid to them, although bibliographies have used these presentation copies to identify editions and dates and also to detect forgeries.”

Stetz's lecture was entitled “George Egerton's Keynotes.” An Irish feminist and author, Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) lived a wild, unconventional life, according to Stetz, with a succession of lovers and husbands.

In her talk, Stetz compared Egerton's original manuscript of Keynotes (1893), a group of short stories, with the published version, which was highly successful and is once more being studied as an example of feminist literature of the late 19th century. The stories were arranged by Egerton as a kind autobiographical narrative of her life but were rearranged by the publisher with the most sensational story as the first one, creating a different focus so that each story stood alone. Changing the order “contributed greatly to the volume's success and that success pleased the publisher and author alike, as both were desperate for financial stability and for professional advancement,” Stetz said in her lecture. Today, however, looking at the author's original idea for the volume can restore the book's power as a unique account of one Victorian woman's struggle for autonomy.

In addition to the lectures, Samuels Lasner and Stetz talked to the seminar participants about research materials available at UD's library, new ways of teaching and possible new research projects in literary history.

Stetz is currently working on editing a digitalized version of Egerton's Fantasias for Rice University Press. Samuels Lasner is scheduled to participate in a symposium, “Books in Hard Times,” to be held at the Grolier Club in New York in September; his message is that this difficult economic period is actually a great time to collect books.

Article by Sue Moncure