ONE OF the pleasures that accompanies the completion of a project like this one is the opportunity to thank those people who have supported, encouraged, and contributed to it over a long period of time. I am grateful, first of all, for the ongoing support of the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Princeton University, which funded my research for a number of summers and a trip to England in the spring of 2000. In the final stages of writing, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled me to take a crucial full year’s leave from teaching to complete my book.
At the Gypsy Collections at the University of Liverpool, Katy Hooper and other staff members welcomed me and helped with valuable research advice. I am grateful for permission to use materials, both manuscripts and photographs, in the Gypsy Lore Collections. At Princeton University, two groups of resourceful graduate students in my seminar “Race, Nation, and Englishness,” on nineteenth-century literature, inspired my thinking and added fresh insights to my work. I have published very little of what follows in this book, but editors and readers who commented on my article “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 2 (1998), gave me confidence to pursue this project at an early stage. I have benefited greatly from being able to present some of this work to receptive and critically astute audiences at the Victorian Studies Conference of Western Canada; the North American Conference on British Studies; the conference “Locating the Victorians” in London; the colloquium “Europe and the Gypsies” at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; a graduate student and faculty group at Hunter College, New York; a nineteenth-century seminar at the University of Chicago; and the Victorian Colloquium at Princeton.
Colleagues, students, and friends have given me intellectual sustenance: they responded to my work, shared their own with me, and sent Gypsy references my way on a continuing basis. I am grateful for the interest and advice of Carol Armstrong, Daniel Blanton, Natalie Davis, Lou Deutsch, Maria DiBattista, Lisa Fluet, Edward Groth, Ian Hancock, Mary Harper, Richard Kaye, Howard Keeley, Uli Knoepflmacher, Beth Machlan, Peter Mandler, Arno Mayer, Gage McWeeny, Jeff Nunokawa, Susan Pennybacker, Ellen Pollak, Jim Richardson, Eve Rosenhaft, Christine Stansell, Susan Stewart, Lisa Tickner, Katie Trumpener, and Judy Walkowitz. Kate Flint has been a devoted and immeasurably helpful reader and interlocutor. I am also extremely grateful to Michael Ragussis, who read the manuscript with care and intelligence. I am indebted to the work of scholars, especially George Behlmer and David Mayall, who wrote about Gypsies in nineteenth-century Britain long before I began this project. This book stands on the shoulders of their scholarship. At Columbia University Press, Jennifer Crewe has been a highly encouraging and astute editor. I am grateful for her interest in this book and her stewardship of its publication. The illustrations for the book were gathered with the invaluable help of Alexandra Neel. Her excellent eye and intrepid approach to digital reproduction of images have enabled me to give this book an otherwise impossible visual richness.
My most personal debts are a good deal harder to define. I hope it is not too self-indulgent to say that sustaining the career of an academic woman of a certain age and life experience requires the understanding and encouragement of other, like-minded women. I am forever thankful for the friendship of Maria DiBattista, Ellen Pollak, and Chris Stansell. They have been an inspiration to me for many years. The Program in the Study of Women and Gender has been my second home at Princeton, and I am delighted to be able to acknowledge Barbara Gershen, its academic manager and presiding muse. My students in the program have been a gifted and spirited bunch. Finally, I am sustained by a family that combines, in equal parts, great warmth, humor, and intelligence. I dedicate this book to my beloved sons, David and Joseph. My husband, Philip Nord, patient, funny, and wise, continues to be my most resourceful—and certainly my most loving—critic.
