Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada.
The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present.
From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.

Jessica Schagerl’s research focuses on Canadian studies, drawing heavily on archival material; she is also invested in questions of professional concern, including mentoring and the futures of arts and humanities. She is the alumni and development officer for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Western Ontario.

Jessica Schagerl's profile page

Linda M. Morra, an associate professor at Bishopâ??s University, specializes in Canadian literature and Canadian studies. Her research focuses on women and the publishing industry in Canada. Her publications include Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (2006), [http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/morra.shtml Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations (co-editor with Deanna Reder, WLU Press, 2010), and an edition of Jane Ruleâ??s autobiography, Taking My Life (2011).

Jessica Schagerlâ??s research focuses on Canadian studies, drawing heavily on archival material; she is also invested in questions of professional concern, including mentoring and the futures of arts and humanities. She is the alumni and development officer for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Western Ontario.

Linda M. Morra's profile page

This anthology, with its strong editors' introduction and Janice Fiamengo's illustrative afterword, is a welcome addition to the archival researcher's bookshelf. Taken together, its insightful essays amply demonstrate the various complexities involved in responsibly interpreting the lives, experiences and motivations of women in Canada's intellectual, political and cultural life.

Barbara M. Freeman, Herizons, Fall 2013, 2013 November 1

Each of the volume's authors explores some of the unacknowledged, yet crucial, ethical, material, and cultural boundaries that pertain to the archiving of, and access to, the works of Canadian women.... The book's contributors also address issues extending beyond gender, such as the challenges of archiving digital works and those of a more ephemeral nature, modes of resistant reading and in every way challenge the static view of how we might come to understand both archives and the process of archiving.

Kane Faucher, Western News, 2013 October 1

One of the many strengths of this volume is the inclusion of the perspectives of those who have been archived.... As well, I find the inclusion of an archivist's perspective valuable.... [These perspectives] serve as a reminder of the impact of the actual work of archival appraisal and processing on a body of records.... In her thoughtful afterword, Janice Fiamengo regrets the lack of training she received in archival research as a graduate student in English. Morra and Schargerl's collection of essays should easily act as the beginnings of such an education. Though it does not offer a how-to, it does present the reader with numerous thoughtful and engaging points of view on the nature and value of the archive, on the challenges of archival research and its risks and benefits, and on the ethical imperatives associated with all different types of archive work. The book provides an excellent starting point for an investigation of Hobb's fundamental question: ‘What does it mean to ‘do right’ by someone's achives?’

Jennifer Douglas, University of Victoria and University of British Columbia, Labour/Le Travail, 73, 2014 June 1

Basements and Attics theorizes archives as non-neutral sites, and articulates archival work as open to critical interpretations and methodologies.... Each section explores alternative research by highlighting the resourcefulness of publishers' archives, private collections, or digital repositories. The contributions included in ‘Reorientations’ and ‘Responsibilities,’ for instance, constitute excellent ‘how-to’ guides for researchers interested not only in how archives problematize (dis)location, representation, and cultural translation, but also in ethical (re)readings of an author's literary career.... Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace...serves as an essential guide in defining what constitutes an archive—as an ideologically and culturally constructed site—and in addressing pertinent challenges encountered both in the creation and study of Canadian women's archives, and also those presented by the advent of new technologies.

Cristina Ivanovici, Canadian Literature, 219, Winter 2013, 2014 July 1

Although the essays are written within a Canadian context, the issues brought forward are universal. This book will be helpful to archivists; teachers/practitioners in archival or library science and their students; and researchers, particularly those who work in the area of cultural memory.... Recommended.

L.J. Sherlock, Victoria University Library, Choice, 2013 June 1