Documentary Editing, Association for

 

Date of this Version

Summer 2006

Document Type

Article

Citation

Documentary Editing, Volume 28, Number 2, Summer 2006. ISSN 0196-7134

Comments

2006 © the Association for Documentary Editing. Used by permission.

Abstract

Recent scholarship has focused on Boyce's relationship with Hapgood as the prototype of the modern open marriage. In her book, Intimate Warriors, editor Ellen Kay Trimberger uses portions of both writers' works to argue that the couple's "warfare" (33)-over his affairs, her desire to work, and his aversion to working at all-enhanced her creativity and kept the marriage alive. l Carol DeBoer-Langworthy takes the opposite view. In her book, The Modern World of Neith Boyce, she argues that Boyce's difficult marriage jeopardized her health, sapped her creative energy, and ultimately shortened her career. She maintains that Boyce's autobiographical writings, published here for the first time, were the author's attempt to recover the autonomy that eluded her in marriage. Boyce may not have been able to break with Hapgood in life, but in art, she could make him a minor character, which she does in these biographical fragments-a partial autobiography written in 1940, and two shorter diaries written during European sojourns in 1903 and 1914.

Share

COinS