Susan Carlile

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My route is a bit circuitous. I taught English in Madrid for three years after college and became interested in Spanish literature. So when I returned to the US and began teaching high school in Phoenix, I hoped to get an MA in Spanish literature. However, at that time Arizona State did not offer Spanish literature classes at night. I had a hunch that there must have been an English author who had been influenced by a Spanish one, so I enrolled in the English MA program. Soon I found Charlotte Lennox, author of The Female Quixote, and ended up writing my MA thesis on this insightful and satirical novel. I became fascinated with Lennox’s pluck, persistence, and prolific output in the early years of professional authorship in London, started studying her other works, and collected all I could about her. My interest in how she managed to publish so much, in so many different genres, and with such interestingly subversive subtexts served as my way in to eighteenth-century studies.
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2. What are you working on right now?
Charlotte Lennox: An Independent Mind came out with Toronto University Press in April. Aside from giving myself more time to enjoy teaching and re-think a few of my courses, I am promoting the book. In fact, I am finding that getting the word out could turn into a full-time job. I am experimenting with how to use social media effectively, including retooling ideas from my book into blog posts. In addition to my own professional twitter account @susancarlile, I also tweet @LadysMuseum as Charlotte Lennox. My current research includes women’s involvement in natural history at mid-century, how it was expressed in women’s periodicals, and how and why magazine installments addressing women’s education circulated between England and Spain.

3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Questions that have driven my work center around how the English literary canon was formed: What interests privileged one kind of imaginative writing over another? What conditions facilitated a person to set her ideas down on paper? Why one genre over another? And how did these piece end up in print? Also, what criteria have those with power in the academy used to select the best literary productions? Many women authors have only begun to be taken seriously in the last twenty years. This blows my students’ minds. They like reading texts like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, and Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta, none of which were taught when I took graduate classes in the 1990s. My work has centered on women writers’ lives and works because a well-researched critical biography gives author’s more validity. So many intellectual women’s lives have been lost due to their lower status and their perceived inferior value to history. I was motivated by the fact that so many biographies have been written about Shakespeare when only something like five sure facts exist about him.

4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? 
I have been thinking about how we can promote our tireless research and fascinating findings to a larger audience. This summer I read Abigail William’s The Social Life of Books (Yale University Press) and really enjoyed it. Williams gives us a more detailed picture of the function and influence of the wide practice of communal reading and shows the value of print for the tradesman, the merchant, the clergyman, the sister, and the mother. She makes lesser-studied literary output engaging to wider audiences and shows how these print productions had a powerful effect on individual lives and on an emerging literary culture.

5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
I find it useful to remember to take the long view of one’s career. Most of us have seasons of more productivity and less. There are times when we absolutely must focus intensely on our research and writing and other times when teaching, university service, and family will capture more of our attention. It is important however, even in these times when other aspects of life seem to be taking over to fight for our research and writing time. The key is to stay in the game…even just a little. For me, informal conversations and virtual writing huddles have fueled my work in meaningful ways. Hearing other people’s strategies for squeezing in writing between a myriad of responsibilities and honest acknowledgements when their work is going very, very slowly have helped me remember that research and writing is sometimes a tedious and lonely road for everyone who eventually publishes. Knowing that there are others out there also elbowing out half-hour chunks of time as often as possible to work on what some days feels very obscure has frequently buoyed my spirits and gotten me back in my chair for another half-hour session, that sometimes turns into an hour and a half. Those small chunks of time feed one’s energy to then steal and beg for larger chunks of time, which can (amazingly) add up to finished products. From these frank confabs with trusted colleagues I have learned to have (a little bit) more patience with myself to simply persevere in the research and writing that is important to me and in the struggle to find ways to make that work interesting to more people.

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