Barbara Bodichon's epistolary archive: silences that speak.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and imbalance as a handicap, this paper argues that the silences her epistolary archive contains can be turned into a meaningful source of information and thus are methodologically relevant. To do so, it examines the extent to which Bodichon herself might have introduced silences ([un]consciously) as a strategy to exercise power over her own narrative. In order to tease out these epistolary silences and make them speak, this paper reads them through the lens of Lisa Mazzei's poetics of silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]