Guide to the Edith Rickert Papers 1883-1960


Search this Finding Aid





Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Descriptive Summary
• Information on Use
• Access
• Citation
• Biographical Note
• Scope Note
• Related Resources
• Subject Headings
• INVENTORY
• Series I: Correspondence
• Series II: Journals and Notebooks
• Series III: Writings
  • Subseries 1: Novels
  • Subseries 2: Short Stories
  • Subseries 3: Poems
  • Subseries 4: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews
  • Subseries 5: Translations and Works by Others
• Series IV: Biographical

Acknowledgments

Descriptive Summary

Information on Use

Access

No restrictions.

Citation

When quoting material from this collection, the preferred citation is: Rickert, Edith. Papers, [Box #, Folder #], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Biographical Note

Edith Rickert was born in Canal Dover, Ohio, in 1871. She received an A.B. from Vassar College in 1891 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1899. From 1897 to 1900, while completing her dissertation, a study of the Middle English romance Emare, she returned to Vassar as an instructor in English.

In 1900, Rickert left the United States for nine years of study, travel, and writing in England and on the Continent. During this period of her life, she edited several medieval texts, prepared translations of medieval literature, published five novels including The Reaper (1904), Folly (1906), and The Golden Hawk (1907), and wrote more than eighty short stories, fifty of which were published in British and American magazines. In 1909, Rickert returned to the United States and settled in Boston, where for several years she was an editor with D. C. Heath and the Ladies' Home Journal. With the onset of American involvement in World War I, she moved to Washington, D.C. and assumed a position as cryptographer in the War Department, working with John Matthews Manly, a Professor of English at the University of Chicago who had taken a leave of absence to serve as a captain in the military intelligence section. After the War, Rickert and Manly collaborated on The Writing of English (1919), Contemporary British Literature (1921), Contemporary American Literature (1922), and several other popular textbooks. In 1924, Rickert joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as Associate Professor of English; she was appointed Professor of English in 1930 and remained on the faculty until her retirement in 1935.

Rickert's career at the University was devoted largely to the extensive project undertaken with Manly to compile a definitive critical edition of the Canterbury Tales. Beginning in 1930, Rickert and Manly spent part of each year in England tracing manuscripts of the Tales, researching the details of Chaucer's life, and supervising a staff of workers employed at the Public Records Office in London. The remainder of each year was spent in Chicago, where Rickert taught courses in medieval and modern literature and continued her professional publications, the most notable of which was New Methods for the Study of Literature (1927). She also completed three volumes of children's stories and a final novel, Severn Woods (1930).

Rickert died in Chicago in 1938. The eight-volume product of her long association with Manly, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, appeared in its final form in 1940, several months before Manly's own death. Rickert's anthology of material illustrating fourteenth-century English life, Chaucer's World, was edited by two former students and published in 1948.

Scope Note

Series I: CORRESPONDENCE

This series consists of chronologically arranged correspondence. For the most part, the correspondence is personal, although a few letters from publishers are included. The earliest letters were exchanged between Edith Rickert and her parents while she was a student at Vassar College. Among her later correspondents, the most important were Frederick James Furnivall, the English philologist and founder of the Chaucer Society, and John Burroughs, the American writer and naturalist. Furnivall's correspondence by letter and postcard extended from 1896 to 1909; the letters are found in the main chronological sequence, while the postcards have been placed in a separate folder. The nineteen letters from Burroughs date from 1902 to 1921, the year of his death (see Index); the collection includes two copies of his poem, "Waiting," one a holograph and the other a holograph facsimile printed as a New Year greeting for 1911.

Series II: JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS

Eighteen chronologically arranged journals and notebooks at the beginning of this series document Rickert's life and work from 1896 to 1907, including her first trip to Europe, her three years of teaching at Vassar, and her career as a writer in England. These are followed by a notebook dated April 26, 1920 and three folders of miscellaneous notes and notebooks. The journals and notebooks contain vivid and often detailed accounts of Rickert's travels, as well as lists of completed works and ideas for future stories.

Series III: WRITINGS

Rickert's literary work is organized here in five subseries: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Memoirs, and Reviews, and Translations and Works by Others. Rickert made extensive notes and corrections on most of these texts, whether holograph or printed, with multiple copies often bearing different sets of corrections.

The sub-series devoted to Novels consists of manuscripts of four unpublished works: Family, Lost Legions, While Breakfast Waits, and Young Alexander. Family, a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with the coming of age of a young woman, was never completed, although the manuscript preserves several stages of work over a period of years. Commenting on this novel, Rickert wrote: "If the theme is worth doing and if my doing of it shows promise, I am willing to work the book over as often as need be, even to forty and four times."

The second sub-series, Short Stories, contains an alphabetical sequence of one hundred stories, most of them completed during Rickert's years in England. No attempt has been made to separate manuscript and printed copies. Many of the stories are historical romances or sentimental vignettes based on Rickert's travels and observations. Titled stories are followed by one folder of untitled works and fragments.

Poems, the third sub-series, consists of titled and untitled verse.

Sub-series four, Essays, Memoirs, and Reviews, contains essays drawn from Rickert's visits to European villages, a memoir of her friend F. J. Furnivall, descriptions of manuscript collections at the University of Chicago and British Museum, and a proposal for an Institute for Mediaeval Research. Titled items are followed by a folder of untitled book reviews.

The final sub-series, Translations and Works by Others, includes the manuscripts of three unpublished novels. Priscilla on-Her-Own by "Marjorie Fleming" (8:5-8) may be Rickert's work, given the character of the story and the hand in which corrections were made. Riders in the Night (8:9-9:2) and an untitled historical novel (9:4-7) show Rickert's editorial changes, but no firm attribution of authorship can be made in either case.

Series IV: BIOGRAPHICAL

This series comprises miscellaneous items documenting Edith Rickert's life and work. Seven folders preserve leaves from a scrapbook containing reviews of Folly, The Golden Hawk, and The Beggar in the Heart. These are followed by folders containing reviews of New Methods for the Study of Literature and other books, bibliographies of published works, and biographical clippings. Fred B. Millet's research notes and correspondence for his memoir of Rickert are included here, as are letters from Margaret Rickert seeking a publisher for her sister's stories. The series concludes with memorabilia and photographs and three books owned by Rickert's mother, Josephine Newburgh Rickert.

Related Resources

The following related resources are located in the Department of Special Collections:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/select.html

Further information on Edith Rickert and her career at the University of Chicago can be found in the Chaucer Research Collection, the papers of John Matthews Manly, and the records of the Department of English.

Subject Headings

• Rickert, Edith, 1871-1938
• Manly, John Matthews, 1865-1940
• Bates, Katharine Lee, 1859-1929
• Burroughs, John, 1837-1921
• Furnivall, Frederick James, 1825-1910
• Rickert, Edith, 1871-1938
• Authors
• English teachers

INVENTORY