Editing Sophia Peabody’s Cuba Journal: Travel, Recovery, and Interpretation

Some collaborations are born out of chance encounters. For us, it happened at a recent conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Having briefly met before on the common ground of studies in nineteenth- century American literature, we said “Hello” and discovered in the space of a five-minute conversation that both of us had our eyes on the early nineteenth- century journal-account of a young New Englander’s rest cure in Cuba. The traveler who authored the journal was Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809–1871), an accomplished visual artist, writer, member of a family that was vitally involved in the intellectual and cultural life of antebellum New England, and later Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collaborator and wife. Creating an edition of her crumb - ling unpublished manuscript from the 1830s had begun to take shape in our respective research plans, but after discussing our individual intentions, we eventually agreed to embark on the project together. We come to Peabody’s text with complementary angles of interest: Cheryl J. Fish, in women’s travel texts of nineteenth-century America and the intersections among travel, race, and disability studies; Jana Argersinger, in “relational aesthetics,” theories of antebellum female authorship, and scholarly editing