Dorothy L. Sayers and Feminist Archival Historiography in Dante Studies

(Re)discovering Female Authorship in Fin de Siècle Britain

Abstract

This article compares the vociferous Dantean archive of Dorothy L. Sayers with the deafening silence that swallowed up the of the first generation of British women dantiste, whose achievements lie dispersed across general collections and print archives. My documentary reconstruction counters these narrow representational politics to by placing Sayers’ experience within a longer historiographical perspective which recovers the role of Victorian foremothers as agents of production and mediation (interpretation, transmission, circulation, and popularisation) of Dante’s critical and scholarly knowledge across different media, genres, and generations of readers at the turn of the twentieth century.