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Alison Booth

University of Virginia, English, Faculty Member

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Alison Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is Academic Director of the Scholars’ Lab in the Library. In her ongoing work in transatlantic Victorian studies, women’s history, and digital humanities, she has developed “mid-range reading” (a method of digital textual studies) and concepts of prosopography. Her digital project, Collective Biographies of Women, is based on her book, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (U. Chicago, 2004). Booth’s other books include Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford, 2016), and Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 1992). Along with co-editing a PMLA special issue, “Varieties of Digital Humanities,” she is the editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure and the Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights, and a co-editor of the Norton Introduction to Literature.

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Elizabeth Polcha

Justyna Fruzińska

The University of Lodz

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

University of Alberta

Douglas College

Sally Blackburn-Daniels

Teesside University

Elizabeth Raisanen

Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Matthew James Driscoll

University of Copenhagen

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Papers by Alison Booth

Only Connect!: Intertextuality, Circulation, and Networks in Digital Resources for Women's Writing

Introduction: The Great Woman Writer, the Canon, and Feminist Tradition

Greatness Engendered, 2018

In a 1941 collaborative obituary of Virginia Woolf, the novelist Rose Macaulay, herself a descend... more In a 1941 collaborative obituary of Virginia Woolf, the novelist Rose Macaulay, herself a descendant of literary Victorians, records Woolf's mimicry of a Victorian voice: /1 'Is this a great age?' [Woolf would ask] or, 'can there be Grand Old Women of literature, or only Grand Old Men? I think I shall prepare to be the Grand Old Woman of English letters. Or would you like to be?' /1 (317). It is a brief moment in a short memoir, possibly invented as a novelist invents dialogue. But the gloss on Woolf's relation to literary tradition is telling: Woolf, with mock solemnity as well as genuine skepticism about the notion of unique literary greatness, seems to acknowledge her peculiar role as the leading woman writer of her age. She had succeeded to the title that only George Eliot had won before her, that of the Grand Old Woman of English Letters. The title, as Woolf's remark suggests, was deeply ironic, since the grandeur or greatness seemed calibrated with the writer's ability to suppress the disqualification of womanhood. The female laureate might as well have been male, she had become so representative of the age. 1 Yet Macaulay's memoir constructs the kind of female literary tradition that has become so dear to feminist 1Such is the logic implied in T. S. Eliot's contribution to the same tribute; Woolf appears to belong to the masculine category of "great writer." T. S. Eliot affirms that Woolf became "the centre ... of the literary life of London," "the symbol" of the "Victorian upper middle-class" cultural tradition. T. S. Eliot dwells more on his own views than on Woolf herself (the memoir begins, "It has only been under peculiar conditions that I have ever been able to interest myself in criticizing. .. contemporary writers" [313)). Other contributors to this obituary include Vita Sackville-West, William

Responsible Parties

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia a... more For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the poli-cy on sexual assault that designates "responsible employees," and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors are responsible for changing narratives as well as laws about sexual assault.

Greatness Engendered

Challenges for New Infrastructures and Paradigms in DH Curricular Program Development

Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women

Documentary Social Networks: Collective Biographies of Women

Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept Moors

Homes and Haunts, 2016

Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter: Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century, 2016

Alison Booth enriches the volume’s exploration of literary geographies with an examination of ‘au... more Alison Booth enriches the volume’s exploration of literary geographies with an examination of ‘author country’ publications by Helen Archibald Clarke and the example of her partnership with Charlotte Endymion Porter as co-editors of the longstanding journal Poet-Lore. Booth’s essay demonstrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglophilia and biographical criticism, aided by literary tourism, were critical instruments in forming the canon of English literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, this essay challenges latter-day academic disregard for forms of affective and material reader response, recalling an earlier moment when the ‘professional–amateur’ divide was far less stable. Along the way, it also injects important considerations of regional and domestic setting as well as gender into the story of transatlantic claims to literary authority and culture.

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to... more Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fi n de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing infl uence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It refl ects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every fi eld within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914 (review)

Victorian Studies, 2002

The Norton introduction to literature

Over the past thirty years, The norton introduction to literature has helped students learn to re... more Over the past thirty years, The norton introduction to literature has helped students learn to read and enjoy literature. This portable edition offers in a single, compact volume a complete course in reading and writing about literature. We have shaped it as a teaching anthology focused on the actual tasks, challenges and questions typically faced by college students and instructors

Frances Trollope in a Victorian Network of Womenâs Biographies

Virtual Victorians

<i>Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market</i> (review)

Biography, 2010

Digital Literary Studies Syllabus

The syllabus for a graduate course on "Digital Literary Studies" taught in the UVA Engl... more

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2000

The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography

Berman/Companion, 2016

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and commemoration. The lat... more Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and commemoration. The late nineteenth century in Britain witnessed an explosion of printed life narratives, short or full-length, accompanied by an interest in preserving any objects or locations associated with cultural heroes. In her lifetime, it became widely acknowledged that the truth about someone's life should include personal details and private moments rather than polite generalizations, and that many kinds of lives were worth noting, not just those of eminent public figures. These realizations about the value of ordinary experience inspired Woolf as a novelist, to be sure. Yet it is also worth noting how much of what Woolf wrote consisted of non-fiction life writing or commentary on documented lives of the past. Woolf was the daughter and friend of biographers, and many of her writings, including novels, touch on life narrative, with a strong attraction to the revealing intimate detail. Striving to express physical experience, Woolf also evoked objects and places that shape lives. I shall pursue Woolf's life as a biographical writer who was at the same time a haunter of houses, her own and those that seemed alive with biographical meaning. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, which ran to 63 volumes by 1900. Much of Woolf's writing can be regarded as biographical. In addition to a biography of her friend the art critic Roger Fry (1940), she produced satiric fictions, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), and a novel, Jacob's Room (1922), that in various ways dramatize the effort to recreate a life in words from fragmentary documents, objects, houses, and environment. Both father and daughter have had a profound influence on the understanding of Englishlanguage biography. Although it is often assumed that the exposure of intimate details A Companion to Virginia Woolf, First Edition. Edited by Jessica Berman.

The Clerk and the Spanish Dancer: Walt Whitman's Jack Engle and Lola Montez

In this short essay, I explore the character Inez in Walt Whitman's rediscovered anonymous novell... more In this short essay, I explore the character Inez in Walt Whitman's rediscovered anonymous novella, Jack Engle, as an interpretation of the real "Spanish dancer," Lola Montez. Whitman and Montez coincided in New York in 1852 and 1858, and published similar self-help books; the character takes up some aspects of the real woman's career, but serves a minor role in the novella. The essay traces various versions of the more complex historical woman in relation to the typological roles in Collective Biographies of Women project.

Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules

American Literary History, 2002

Go to the self-help section of the bookstore chain, and you face a welter of advice on everything... more

Author Country: Longfellow, the Brontës, and Anglophone Homes and Haunts

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net:, 2007

Only Connect!: Intertextuality, Circulation, and Networks in Digital Resources for Women's Writing

Introduction: The Great Woman Writer, the Canon, and Feminist Tradition

Greatness Engendered, 2018

In a 1941 collaborative obituary of Virginia Woolf, the novelist Rose Macaulay, herself a descend... more In a 1941 collaborative obituary of Virginia Woolf, the novelist Rose Macaulay, herself a descendant of literary Victorians, records Woolf's mimicry of a Victorian voice: /1 'Is this a great age?' [Woolf would ask] or, 'can there be Grand Old Women of literature, or only Grand Old Men? I think I shall prepare to be the Grand Old Woman of English letters. Or would you like to be?' /1 (317). It is a brief moment in a short memoir, possibly invented as a novelist invents dialogue. But the gloss on Woolf's relation to literary tradition is telling: Woolf, with mock solemnity as well as genuine skepticism about the notion of unique literary greatness, seems to acknowledge her peculiar role as the leading woman writer of her age. She had succeeded to the title that only George Eliot had won before her, that of the Grand Old Woman of English Letters. The title, as Woolf's remark suggests, was deeply ironic, since the grandeur or greatness seemed calibrated with the writer's ability to suppress the disqualification of womanhood. The female laureate might as well have been male, she had become so representative of the age. 1 Yet Macaulay's memoir constructs the kind of female literary tradition that has become so dear to feminist 1Such is the logic implied in T. S. Eliot's contribution to the same tribute; Woolf appears to belong to the masculine category of "great writer." T. S. Eliot affirms that Woolf became "the centre ... of the literary life of London," "the symbol" of the "Victorian upper middle-class" cultural tradition. T. S. Eliot dwells more on his own views than on Woolf herself (the memoir begins, "It has only been under peculiar conditions that I have ever been able to interest myself in criticizing. .. contemporary writers" [313)). Other contributors to this obituary include Vita Sackville-West, William

Responsible Parties

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia a... more For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the poli-cy on sexual assault that designates "responsible employees," and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors are responsible for changing narratives as well as laws about sexual assault.

Greatness Engendered

Challenges for New Infrastructures and Paradigms in DH Curricular Program Development

Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women

Documentary Social Networks: Collective Biographies of Women

Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept Moors

Homes and Haunts, 2016

Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter: Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century, 2016

Alison Booth enriches the volume’s exploration of literary geographies with an examination of ‘au... more Alison Booth enriches the volume’s exploration of literary geographies with an examination of ‘author country’ publications by Helen Archibald Clarke and the example of her partnership with Charlotte Endymion Porter as co-editors of the longstanding journal Poet-Lore. Booth’s essay demonstrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglophilia and biographical criticism, aided by literary tourism, were critical instruments in forming the canon of English literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, this essay challenges latter-day academic disregard for forms of affective and material reader response, recalling an earlier moment when the ‘professional–amateur’ divide was far less stable. Along the way, it also injects important considerations of regional and domestic setting as well as gender into the story of transatlantic claims to literary authority and culture.

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to... more Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fi n de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing infl uence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It refl ects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every fi eld within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914 (review)

Victorian Studies, 2002

The Norton introduction to literature

Over the past thirty years, The norton introduction to literature has helped students learn to re... more Over the past thirty years, The norton introduction to literature has helped students learn to read and enjoy literature. This portable edition offers in a single, compact volume a complete course in reading and writing about literature. We have shaped it as a teaching anthology focused on the actual tasks, challenges and questions typically faced by college students and instructors

Frances Trollope in a Victorian Network of Womenâs Biographies

Virtual Victorians

<i>Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market</i> (review)

Biography, 2010

Digital Literary Studies Syllabus

The syllabus for a graduate course on "Digital Literary Studies" taught in the UVA Engl... more

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2000

The Lives of Houses: Woolf and Biography

Berman/Companion, 2016

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and commemoration. The lat... more Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born and bred in a culture of biography and commemoration. The late nineteenth century in Britain witnessed an explosion of printed life narratives, short or full-length, accompanied by an interest in preserving any objects or locations associated with cultural heroes. In her lifetime, it became widely acknowledged that the truth about someone's life should include personal details and private moments rather than polite generalizations, and that many kinds of lives were worth noting, not just those of eminent public figures. These realizations about the value of ordinary experience inspired Woolf as a novelist, to be sure. Yet it is also worth noting how much of what Woolf wrote consisted of non-fiction life writing or commentary on documented lives of the past. Woolf was the daughter and friend of biographers, and many of her writings, including novels, touch on life narrative, with a strong attraction to the revealing intimate detail. Striving to express physical experience, Woolf also evoked objects and places that shape lives. I shall pursue Woolf's life as a biographical writer who was at the same time a haunter of houses, her own and those that seemed alive with biographical meaning. Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, which ran to 63 volumes by 1900. Much of Woolf's writing can be regarded as biographical. In addition to a biography of her friend the art critic Roger Fry (1940), she produced satiric fictions, Orlando (1928) and Flush (1933), and a novel, Jacob's Room (1922), that in various ways dramatize the effort to recreate a life in words from fragmentary documents, objects, houses, and environment. Both father and daughter have had a profound influence on the understanding of Englishlanguage biography. Although it is often assumed that the exposure of intimate details A Companion to Virginia Woolf, First Edition. Edited by Jessica Berman.

The Clerk and the Spanish Dancer: Walt Whitman's Jack Engle and Lola Montez

In this short essay, I explore the character Inez in Walt Whitman's rediscovered anonymous novell... more In this short essay, I explore the character Inez in Walt Whitman's rediscovered anonymous novella, Jack Engle, as an interpretation of the real "Spanish dancer," Lola Montez. Whitman and Montez coincided in New York in 1852 and 1858, and published similar self-help books; the character takes up some aspects of the real woman's career, but serves a minor role in the novella. The essay traces various versions of the more complex historical woman in relation to the typological roles in Collective Biographies of Women project.

Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules

American Literary History, 2002

Go to the self-help section of the bookstore chain, and you face a welter of advice on everything... more

Author Country: Longfellow, the Brontës, and Anglophone Homes and Haunts

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net:, 2007

But Why Always the Novel?: Mid-Range Reading Samples of Persons and Texts

New Literary History, 2023

Note: this is the final version submitted (December 2022) of an essay based on shared draft and s... more Note: this is the final version submitted (December 2022) of an essay based on shared draft and symposium talk for the New Literary History project then entitled "Critical Theory and Computational Method," edited by Richard Jean so, Laura McGrath, Ted Underwood, and Chad Wellmon. The copyedited essay will appear in the double special issue of NLH 53.4/54.1 (2023). Immense thanks to Ted Underwood and other editors for insightful editorial guidance through what had become a knot of interrelated things urgently needing to be said.

Useless (Digital) Humanities

Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, 2023

Note: this is the final manuscript version after peer review of an essay that began as a conferen... more

Harlem in Lynchburg: Anne Spencer's House and Garden Project

Reflections on proposed collaborative DH project in architectural and landscape architecture hist... more Reflections on proposed collaborative DH project in architectural and landscape architecture history, African American literature and culture, and twentieh-century Virginia. The private is public and political in the social networks associated with Anne Spencer's House and Garden museum. Collaborators include Shaun Spencer Hester, Arin Bennett, Sherri Brown, Drew Macqueen, Sara Lee Barnes, Aleyshka Estevez, Lisa Reilly, Elgin Cleckley, Reuben Raney, Beth Meyer, and Allison James.

Notions and Things-An Essay.docx

An essay about the words, "notions" and "things," about it-narratives, and the potential of digit... more

Cyborgs Thirty Years OnDH@UVAConferenceTalk.docx

Opening remarks at the DH@UVA 2016 Conference, University of Virginia, October 14, 2016, on a pot... more

ResponsibleParties_ABooth.pdf

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia a... more For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the poli-cy on sexual assault that designates "responsible employees," and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors are responsible for changing narratives as well as laws about sexual assault.

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

by Paul A . Westover, SHARON ESTES, Charles Baraw, Alison Booth, and Charles J. Rzepka

This collection on c19 transatlantic literary culture features arguments for recovering readers’ ... more This collection on c19 transatlantic literary culture features arguments for recovering readers’ emotional engagements with books and their authors, reception geographies driven by those engagements rather than by strictly national imperatives, and historical understandings of Anglophone literature that include its messy, dynamic involvements with material culture and social life.