Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National
Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love
story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the
Archives is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of
two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the
founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London,
famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After
discovering Scharf's scrapbook of menus and invitations from
England's most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in
the archives of London, searching Scharf's diaries, sketchbooks,
and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted
to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but
found Scharf's passionate attachment to a younger man who had
hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a
Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother.
Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible,
gregarious, prolific, and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant
artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called "my
best friend." The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts,
and dinner parties comes together to produce a rich Victorian
character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we
think we know about sex, class, and profession in his time. Helena
Michie is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and Professor
of English at Rice University. She is the author of Victorian
Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (2006), Sororophobia:
Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (1991) and The
Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (1987) and
co-editor with Ronald Thomas of Nineteenth-Century Geographies:
From the Victorian Age to the American Century (2002). Robyn Warhol
is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the
Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of
Project Narrative. She is the author of Having a Good Cry:
Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms (2003) and Gendered
Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989)
and co-editor with Susan S. Lanser of Narrative Theory Unbound:
Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015).
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