Posted on behalf of Janine St. Germaine, Consulting Archivist

The methodical unfolding, flattening, cleaning and sorting of the Laura Benet Papers continues to reveal an abundance of correspondence with aesthetic merit (marginalia sketches and doodles), as well as valuable historical content.  Letters comprise approximately half of the collection. There are letters between Benet family members, from Laura Benet’s collaborators and comrades, as well as a smaller volume of business letters. One of those business letters, dated 1940, requested Ms. Benet’s support of the World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) located in New York City.  The letter asked Ms. Benet to consider gifting her manuscripts – “to be permanently preserved and saved from destruction…” Unfortunately, the WCWA, which had a number of notable supporters, including Mary Beard and Eleanor Roosevelt, lost most of their expected funding to the war effort and disbanded later that year. The silver lining is that a few decades later, Vassar’s Special Collections was offered the collection, which we are obviously pleased about; however, if she had gifted the material earlier, to any reputable repository, perhaps some of it would be a bit less charred…

As with many collections of personal papers, along with correspondence, there are also a subset of less expected documents. A few such oddities recently found in the Benet collection are worthy of note:

A list of 1894 New Year’s resolutions conjured up by the wife of William Rose Benet.  Resolution Number 10 – I am going to be silent – rounds out the list following on the heals of an effort to avoid say[ing] darn or dash any more.

An note from a friend charting out a train trip to Paris. The writer appears to have either allotted for several hours of sleep… or several visits with sheep.

And lastly, an undated Christmas list penned by William Rose Benet.  The document is ultimately a reading list, accompanied by a request for a cigarette case and (forgive the product placement) a Gillette Safety Razor.

Stayed tuned for more updates from the wacky world of archival work!

Posted on behalf of Janine St. Germaine, Consulting Archivist

Twenty five cubic feet of boxes filled with personal correspondence, diaries and assorted manuscripts documenting the creative life of poet and Vassar alumna (Class of 1907) Laura Benet are currently being processed in the Archives and Special Collections Library. Selections of the collections were affected by an undocumented fire and require cleaning and special handling.

The first box opened revealed a trove of correspondence and
photographic prints.

Ms. Benet, born in 1884 in Brooklyn, NY, was a poet, editor, novelist and biographer. Her livelihood also included work as a social worker at the Spring Street Settlements and Children’s Aid Society in New York City.

Ms. Benet came from a noted a literary lineage — her brothers, William Rose Benet and Stephen Vincent Benet were both acclaimed poets, and upon closer inspection in this collection, one recognizes the literary talents of Benet’s mother (often referred to as “Mother Bunny” in several letters from her progeny), also a published writer with a passion for lengthy letter writing.

Correspondence in the collection includes letters from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost and Marianne Moore, as well a large volume of correspondence between the Benet family members, including several to and from Stephen Vincent Benet and William Rose Benet. One notable piece of correspondence that surfaced early in this effort is a letter from Yale’s Registrar to the parents of William Rose Benet, dated 1905, two years prior to completing his degree. The letter alerts Benet’s parents that William Rose has been put on probation due to “serious scholarship deficiencies and irregular attendance.” Mother Bunny responds:

… Oh, I am so grieved and so ashamed! Do you not know, my child, that you are just the apple of my eye, the very core of my heart, and do you not realize that your father is giving you generously, all that which men’s sons get, and that he has had a year of great anxiety and worry that I am about used up from the same causes, and can you add a feather’s weight to the load?

More to come…