Probing the Archive – Finding Literary Agents

On 8 May 1931, author James Hanley (1897-1985) wrote a begging letter to publishers Chatto & Windus. ‘I am in the position of being a person who is getting married next Thursday and who has no money’ he explained. ‘I cannot ask Pinker for anything because he has already helped my people who are very poor indeed. […] It is Pinker who is practically keeping my parents out of the bloody...

This paper investigates how literary agents operated in the gendered and bureaucratic infrastructures, shaping the production of modernist texts and interwar literary culture. By examining the archives of major publishers such as Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press, and Duckworth, it focuses on marginalia such as handwritten annotations and literary agents’ commentary that crowd the margins of...

In 2022, Corinna Norrick-Rühl and Miaïna Razakamanantsoa acknowledged the issue of investigating literary agents and representatives in archives, indicating that researchers’ work may, in this regard, ‘be influenced by the work of others, such as by former employees of the publisher and their filing preferences, but also by archivists and their knowledge organization strategies’ (C....