Women’s Resource Centre

The Women’s Resource Centre is the Lincoln institution where Maud Bailey works and deposits manuscripts associated with Christabel LaMotte. It is both a place of preservation and a point of negotiation: the documents housed there belong to a longer chain of family transmission, while the disputed letters raise separate questions about physical ownership, copyright, publication, and access. The Centre’s relatively limited security and resources sharpen the tension between keeping women’s writings together and making them available to scholars.

Collections and Custody

Maud identifies the Centre as the repository for LaMotte’s manuscripts: Melusina, The City of Is, two books of fairy tales, and scattered lyrics. Her family considers itself owner of the copyright in LaMotte’s poems and stories, though Maud qualifies that claim; the manuscripts themselves have been deposited at the Centre. The family has few letters. It acquired Blanche Glover’s journal at a Sotheby’s sale, discreetly, before its importance was widely recognized.

The manuscripts’ passage to Maud is rooted in a family bequest. After LaMotte died in 1890, her sister Sophia sent papers and poems to her daughter May, Maud’s great-great-grandmother, explaining that LaMotte had wished her work to pass through the female line. Sophia described LaMotte as a poet whose achievement had not yet been properly acknowledged. The papers were preserved, although the family record gives no sign that May took a sustained interest in them. The Centre thus holds materials whose survival depended on private inheritance before they entered an institutional setting.

A subsequently discovered will clarified the bequest: LaMotte left all her books, papers, and copyrights to Maia Thomasine Bailey, in the hope that she would eventually become interested in poetry. The document had been folded among Sophia’s accounts. Its rediscovery gave legal force to a history of transmission already remembered in the family, while raising the further question of how manuscript ownership and copyright apply differently to the letters.

The Letters and Competing Rights

The Centre’s significance expands when Maud and Roland’s discovery of the correspondence makes the letters’ custody contested. Euan MacIntyre explains that the physical letter belongs to its recipient, while copyright remains with its writer; LaMotte’s will covers her manuscripts, and the correspondence’s history indicates that she requested the return of her letters from Randolph Henry Ash. Maud’s position as heir to LaMotte’s papers therefore bears directly on ownership of LaMotte’s side of the correspondence, but does not by itself settle every claim to the papers or their texts.

The distinction matters because the correspondence remains unpublished. As MacIntyre explains, copyright in unpublished letters remains with the writers’ heirs, even where the physical manuscripts belong to recipients. The Ash heirs’ rights and Maud’s claim to LaMotte’s manuscripts are therefore not interchangeable. The novel makes the Centre part of a legal and ethical dispute rather than treating deposit as a simple transfer of unrestricted control.

Maud says that she would want LaMotte’s letters to remain at the Centre if they came into her possession, partly because LaMotte’s other family papers are already there. She immediately qualifies the preference: the Centre is not very secure, and the correspondence should, in her view, remain together. Read consecutively, the letters make sense as parts of a shared exchange; separating them would divide not only a physical archive but a narrative whose meaning depends on both writers.

Access and Institutional Stakes

The discussion of where the letters should go exposes a conflict between local preservation and wider scholarly circulation. Blackadder proposes that a sale to the British Library might benefit the Centre financially. Leonora Stern counters that scholars travelling from elsewhere to consult materials at the Centre could benefit it too. Maud’s uncertainty reflects the competing claims: family inheritance, institutional capacity, national location, and the intellectual importance of keeping the correspondence intact.

The Centre also stands opposite the highly resourced collecting ambitions of the Stant Foundation, which seeks access to Ash materials and offers money for documents. Maud fears that her family might be pressed to sell, but believes her father is unlikely to do so given her wish to retain the papers in Britain. Against a model of preservation associated with controlled conditions and restricted access, the Centre represents a women’s-studies institution whose collection has been assembled through family custody, scholarship, and the recovery of neglected work.

The institution’s narrative importance lies in making archival stewardship inseparable from literary recognition. LaMotte’s papers reach the Centre through a female line of inheritance and Maud’s scholarly labor; their placement there gives women’s writing a material home, even as questions of security, legal authority, and access remain unresolved. The Centre is therefore not a final answer to who owns or may read the archive, but the setting in which those claims are made visible and contested.