Love Among The Archives

'Superb. Warhol and Michie's Love Among the Archives is a triumph of a book, that reinvents academic biography and tells a compelling story of the passions and mysteries of Victorian lives and archives. Inventive, witty and knowing, it is both an important reflection on biographical method and a joy to read.' John Bowen, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of York 'A brilliant and ambitious experiment in life writing, Love Among the Archives is a delicious, witty, learned performance. Part scholarly detective story, part postmodern metanarrative, part cautionary tale about the temptations, limits, rewards, frustrations, and secret desires involved in doing archival research, it recalls both Byatt's Possession and Symons's The Quest for Corvo.' John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz Two literary critics romancing the archive at London's National Portrait Gallery Uniting elements of the biography, the detective novel, and the love story, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After discovering Scharf's scrapbook of menus and invitations from England's most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in the archives of London, searching Scharf's diaries, sketchbooks and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but found Scharf's passionate attachment to a younger man who had hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother. Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible, gregarious, prolific and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called 'my best friend'. The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts and dinner parties comes together to produce a rich Victorian character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we think we know about sex, class and profession in his time. Helena Michie is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University. Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Cover images: GS self-portrait, c.1870; GS sketch of Knole House in Kent, 1874; GS sketch of Lady Mary Stanhope in a boat with Miss Henniker and Miss Alice Henniker. 1865. All images (c) National Portrait Gallery, London. Cover design: [EUP logo] www.euppublishing.com