THIS book was completed in the especially conducive environment of the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, during the term of a fellowship funded by the Carnegie Foundation. Other important financial support for the project came in the form of research grants from Boston University, Hamilton College, and the Kirkland Endowment.
Between Men owes a lot to the personal participation of others. This is partly because I meant it to be interdisciplinary, partly because it is political and occurs within a framework of public language, and partly because its subject reaches deeply into my own experiences and those of many people I know. Three feminist women’s groups—the Faculty for Women’s Concerns at Hamilton College, and the ID 450 Collective and a nameless research group in Boston—have contributed most materially (not to mention, immaterially) to the book’s progress. Many people have been generous with readings of chapters and with specific ideas. Gordon Braden advised me on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Laura Brown on the economic context of
The Country Wife. Henry Abelove encouraged me and discussed with me a variety of issues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English history. Coppélia Kahn, Richard Poirier, and Richard Vann were variously respondents to the essay on
Our Mutual Friend. Jonathan Kamholtz, among his contributions of ideas and energy, convinced me that that essay ought to lead to a book. Michael McKeon gave an especially helpful reading of the material on historicism. David Kosofsky sent barrages of clippings, ideas, and encouragement in my direction from all over the world. Linda Gordon, Caroline Walker Bynum, Nancy K. Miller, Ellen Bassuk, and Marilyn Chapin Massey each read several chapters and offered irreplaceable responses from the perspective of her own discipline and sensibility.
Other kinds of intellectual and moral support that underpin a years-long project are even harder to categorize. Among the Usual Suspects are Laverne Berry, Cynthia Chase, Paul Farrell, Joseph Gordon, Madelyn Gutwirth, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Neil Hertz, Marsha Hill, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Nancy Waring, Carolyn Williams, and Joshua Wilner. Rita Kosofsky and Leon Kosofsky each gave a stylistic scrubbing to several chapters, but it would be hardest of all to enumerate their true contributions—among them, language itself.
In addition to the sections of this book that have appeared in journals, several sections have been presented as talks, to groups that have included the MLA, the English Institute, Mid-Atlantic Women’s Studies Association, Northeast Victorian Studies Association, an Ohio Shakespeare Conference, Wesleyan University, the University of Cincinnati, Hamilton College, Colgate University, Harvard University, Brooklyn College, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, Hebrew University, and the Center for the Study of Women at Wellesley College, among others. In each of these encounters, I learned from the comments of many more people than I could name here, including many whose names I never knew.
A version of
chapter 9 appeared in
Raritan; of the Coda, in
Delta; and of
chapters 3 and
4, in
Critical Inquiry. Some material from
chapter 5 appeared as part of a review in
Studies in Romanticism. I am grateful to the editors of all these journals for their willingness to reassign me the necessary permissions.