Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor - Hardcover

"Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol's award-winning Love among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor and Simon Goldhill's eagerly awaited study of the Bensons, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain ... are, moreover, pleasures to read: witty, deft, and stylish." --Talia Schaffer, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1990 "Superb. Warhol and Michie's Love Among the Archives is a triumph of a book, that reinvents academic biography and tells a compelling story of the passions and mysteries of Victorian lives and archives. Inventive, witty and knowing, it is both an important reflection on biographical method and a joy to read." --John Bowen, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, University of York "A brilliant and ambitious experiment in life writing, Love Among the Archives is a delicious, witty, learned performance. Part scholarly detective story, part postmodern metanarrative, part cautionary tale about the temptations, limits, rewards, frustrations, and secret desires involved in doing archival research, it recalls both Byatt's Possession and Symons's The Quest for Corvo." --Professor John O. Jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz Myopically rich in detail and chronically short on perspective, the diaries, letters, and albums Scharf left to the world offer little by way of telos or even vantage point. One of this book's stunning achievements is to find in all these details, in all this stuff, such memorable, mesmerising patterns. --Trev Broughton, Victorian Studies / Vol. 59, No. 2. Winter 2017

WINNER of the 2016 NAVSA Book of the Year! 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.