Lincoln Resource Centre for Women’s Studies

The Lincoln Resource Centre for Women’s Studies is a women’s-studies research centre whose archive preserves a small, uneven body of material relating to Christabel LaMotte and Blanche Glover. Maud Bailey works from its cramped rooms to investigate the women’s lives and writings, while the surviving documents expose the conditions—scarce resources, gendered academic exclusion, and precarious artistic independence—that made preservation and recognition difficult. The Centre’s importance lies in this double role: it enables research, but its gaps also make the history of women’s work visible as a history of loss.

Archive and Holdings

The Centre’s collection includes manuscripts of LaMotte’s Tales, undated lyrics on loose slips, a commonplace book, letters from friends, and the successive revisions of The Fairy Melusina, which LaMotte rewrote at least eight times. It also holds a three-year diary by Glover. The papers had originally been the contents of LaMotte’s desk when she died; she wished them to go to her niece May Bailey in the hope that May would come to care about poetry. May did not, as far as the family knew, pursue that interest: she married a cousin, moved to Norfolk, and raised ten children. Maud later persuaded her father to let the papers be lodged in the Archive.

The collection is explicitly incomplete. Its custodian says that the papers had not been cared for and that no further material had come to light. The survival of a single short diary, alongside manuscripts and scattered lyrics, therefore cannot stand for a comprehensive record of LaMotte’s or Glover’s lives. Instead, the Archive’s holdings make the uneven conditions of women’s literary survival part of the research itself.

Research Space and Scholarly Work

The Centre is the setting for Maud’s investigation into the women’s history surrounding LaMotte. She examines a box-file on Glover’s suicide containing a newspaper account, an inquest transcript, a copy of Glover’s note, and a few letters to a former pupil. These scant records are used to pursue a larger gap: what happened to LaMotte between the Yorkshire journey and the inquest. The effort shows how an archive can support historical inquiry without closing the silences its own limited evidence preserves.

The Centre’s physical scale is part of its depiction. When Leonora Stern arrives, she asks whether she can stay for a night or two and have a carrel in the archives, remarking on how pitifully tiny the space is. Maud recognizes the possibility that this smallness signifies disrespect for Women’s Studies, though Leonora leaves open whether it might instead reflect the meanness of English universities more generally. The cramped setting thus turns an institutional question into a concrete feature of scholarly life: researchers pursue substantial historical work in a space that appears to have little room to spare.

Institutional Exclusion and Women’s Work

The histories the Centre preserves are shaped by material constraints beyond the Archive itself. In Glover’s suicide note, she explains that poverty left her unable to buy paint and that she had sold little work. She rejects returning to governess work, describing it as a life of dependence, and says that she and LaMotte had tried to build useful, fully human lives as independent women through frugality, mutual company, artistic work, and freedom from reliance on men or outside assistance. She concludes that their experiment failed through a combination of an inimical world and their own insufficiency, while hoping that their work might encourage stronger spirits to try again.

The evidence also connects women’s access to academic life with exclusion from institutional decision-making. Beatrice Nest recalls that women at Prince Albert College were barred from the main Senior Common Room until the late 1960s. Important matters were decided in a pub to which women were not invited, even though they were grateful to have employment. That memory gives the Centre’s existence a wider context: women’s research spaces arose within a university culture that restricted where women could gather and participate, and that could make aging itself a reason to treat a woman as marginal.

Preservation, Privacy, and Significance

The Centre’s work is shadowed by the choices through which records are kept, withheld, or destroyed. Beatrice Nest believes that Ellen Ash anticipated that biographers would eventually rummage through private papers, yet did not burn her journal; she did burn many letters, and Nest suspects Ellen rather than Patience and Faith was responsible. Some letters, she says, were buried with Ellen. In another account, Ellen describes burning material Randolph Ash had wanted kept from public view, while placing their letters in his grave because she could neither destroy them nor leave them exposed to future readers.

Against those losses, the Centre’s fragmentary collection offers a place where surviving writing can be read without pretending that the archive is complete or neutral. Its manuscripts and small documentary traces make women’s authorship available for study, while the missing records, precarious work, and restrictions surrounding women’s institutional lives remain inseparable from what the collection can tell. The Centre is therefore not merely a repository: it is a setting in which the struggles over access, memory, and the survival of women’s work become part of the historical account.