Lincoln University Women’s Studies Resource Centre

Lincoln University Women’s Studies Resource Centre is the institution where Maud Bailey works and where the surviving manuscripts of Christabel LaMotte are deposited. Its holdings preserve LaMotte’s writing, but the Centre’s limited resources and uncertain claims over related correspondence make preservation inseparable from questions of who can control and circulate women’s work.

Institutional Role and Holdings

The Centre holds the manuscripts of LaMotte’s Melusina, The City of Is, her two fairy-tale books, and many scattered lyrics. The papers had passed through LaMotte’s family: after her death, her sister Sophia sent a package to her daughter May, who was Maud’s great-great-grandmother. LaMotte had expressed the wish that her papers go to May in the hope that she might come to care about poetry, and Maud later persuaded her father to let the family papers be lodged in the Archive.

The collection is substantial in literary importance but limited in extent. It includes manuscripts of the tales, undated lyrics on loose slips, a commonplace book, a few letters from friends, and the successive revisions of Melusina, which LaMotte rewrote at least eight times. The survival of multiple versions makes the Archive a record not just of finished work but of sustained revision. At the same time, Maud acknowledges that the papers had not been carefully looked after and that no further materials had come to light.

Gaps, Custody, and Documentary Evidence

The Centre’s holdings do not include a substantial body of LaMotte’s correspondence. The family acquired Blanche Glover’s journal at a Sotheby’s sale, secretly, because no one had recognised its importance. The journal covers only three years, beginning when LaMotte and Glover moved to Richmond; it is one of the few surviving records that can illuminate their shared household and the period’s relationships. LaMotte herself apparently kept no journal and advised a niece against habitual self-examination, directing her instead toward shaping thought into art and living out daily obligations.

The collection’s silences are consequential. Maud recounts that LaMotte’s papers were passed along the female line, but family conflict and the uncertain history of custody complicate any simple account of ownership. The archive thus contains both surviving works and evidence of the fragile paths by which they were preserved. Its holdings can support research, but they cannot restore documents that were lost, destroyed, or never kept.

Funding, Copyright, and Access

Maud believes that her family owns the copyright in LaMotte’s poems and stories, though she qualifies that belief. She also considers whether the family might own copyright in LaMotte’s portion of the correspondence, but doubts that there was a will establishing this. The distinction between deposited manuscripts and the rights to publish related letters becomes especially important as the researchers uncover further papers.

The Centre is described as disgracefully underfunded, and Maud resists the suggestion that the papers should instead go to the British Library. Her position is that placing them at the Women’s Resource Centre could attract funding to the institution. The disagreement exposes a material tension: a larger national library might offer resources and wider infrastructure, while the Centre represents a feminist scholarly home for the collection and its research. Maud’s commitment is to keep the papers within that institutional setting, even as their value and the costs of care place pressure on her choice.

Scholarly and Feminist Significance

The Centre’s setting gives institutional form to the novel’s concern with women’s access to authorship, academic authority, and cultural memory. The materials it preserves are not only literary works but records of women’s creative labor: LaMotte’s repeated rewriting, Glover’s artistic contributions, and the acts of female relatives who transmitted and deposited the papers. Their survival depends on custodianship as much as on literary reputation.

That custodianship is neither complete nor neutral. Some letters were burned, some papers disappeared, and the surviving documents have passed through private hands before reaching the Archive. The Centre therefore stands at the intersection of preservation and absence: it offers a place where women’s writing can be studied, while its limited funding and incomplete collection reveal how vulnerable that history remains.