Jane Millgate was a casualty of the War, damaged like my collaborator Brian Higgins by food shortages. We did not get the usual Christmas note and, overwhelmed by our own problems, did not look on the Internet after the first of the year and did not ask anyone until today, the day after the Library of America Melville COMPLETE POEMS interview was published and I was free to retire. What I will do is print here again a few of my tributes to Jane Millgate. I often thought that only David Erdman and I understood just how groundbreaking and brilliant her work was. Apparently others understood as well. In the next days I will re-post some old posts. This first one mentions my ongoing praise of her brilliant contributions to scholarship--"as recently as 2013." Well, I will expand later.
Friday, December 18, 2015
The 1978 book, Editing
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, shows how important
Millgate has been to
developing and intertwining scholarly communities, too. In her
introduction to papers
given at the Conference on Editorial Problems, Millgate deftly
addresses the variations
of method that might be expected in this formative moment for
major editions. Hershel
Parker, as recently as 2013, refracted the energy, enthusiasm
and commitment of that
conference as a community. He touted in particular “Millgate’s
Great Essay on Scott’s THE
SIEGE OF MALTA,” “still the best study of “a document over
which its author did not
have full mental or physical control.’” Millgate’s, he reminds
us, is pioneering
work—not just in editing, or in the formative discipline of disability studies, but in linking
scholars and expanding fields.
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