My monograph from the Tennyson Society is finally out! It arrived as a stressful personal week was already taking a turn for the better, and what a gift.
The project grew out of a question posed by my supervisor during my PhD first-year review: “Why don’t you look more into the contents of the glossary?” From there, it expanded into many, many hours of deciphering handwriting from facsimiles and cross-referencing scraps of quotations. A satisfying breakthrough could come in the form of a single letter’s difference in spelling.
All work – academic or otherwise – has its moments of tedium and trudging, and this project both provoked excitement at clue-hunting in fields of indisputably original research and the feeling that I’d gotten lost in the weeds. Sometimes Google literally returned zero results for my searches, which I didn’t think was even possible. Even when we were on the brink of sending the work to the printers, the complexity of the layout became a major obstacle as it confounded the PDF rendering. Thankfully, my day job grants me access to professional-level tools that enabled me to fix the issues over the course of a very long weekend. And now at long last, the work is out there for other researchers to use. Hurrah!