In Winter 2018 Professors Megan Peiser and Emily Spunaugle had begun research into the identity and collecting habits of Marguerite Bieber Hicks, whose collection is housed at Oakland University. Peiser and Spunaugle had been working together with the Marguerite Hicks Collection in Fall 2017. Often pulling samples from the collection for Peiser’s classes in the areas of book history and eighteenth-century literature, the two found the size of the collection and diversity of its items striking.
The basic facts were clear: around the time of her husband’s, Roy Carl Hicks, death, Marguerite Hicks began purchasing rare books by and about seventeenth and eighteenth-women British writers. Hicks had studied these women during her graduate coursework at Wayne State University in the 1930s, where she wrote her thesis, A Survey of the English Women Writers 1652-1700. Oakland University’s Kresge Library purchased the collection from Hicks in 1971, and it has served largely as a teaching collection since that time.
Peiser and Spunaugle, co-teaching a senior capstone course on The History of the Book for the English Department in Fall 2017, began to wonder just who this woman was who amassed such a collection of items about Early Modern women writers before many scholars considered them worthy of study, and how such items came to be housed at Oakland University. Spurred on by Spunaugle’s 2018 survey of the collection’s items published “By a Lady” which uncovered a poem by Mary Morgan unlisted in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), and previously thought to have been lost, as well as several other items that existed in fewer than a dozen copies worldwide, Peiser and Spunaugle decided that a short article about the collection and its rare and unique contents would benefit the scholarly community at large.
While researching how the remarkable Hicks Collection came to Oakland University, a narrative slowly emerged about this exceptional woman, Marguerite Hicks, her partner, Prof Thelma James (whose collection of folklore materials is also at Kresge Library), early modern queer literature, the golden age of book-collecting, Detroit social clubs, and a book heist.
Peiser and Spunaugle are now undertaking The Marguerite Hicks Project—a multi-pronged project aimed at uncovering Hicks as an innovative, and serious intellectual book-collector in early twentieth-century America.
Possible parts of this project include:
a methodologically focused essay on finding Hicks in the archive—a queer, disabled woman who exists largely in gaps or is visible only when reading between the gaps of the archive;
a study of the provenance of the items in the Hicks Collection, many of which came from English estates recently broken apart and rare book dealers facing financial hardship during World War II;
Hicks as a collector: her intentions, her process, her vision;
a study the collection itself—which features a large number of items by and about queer and lesbian women in Early Modern England; and an exhibit of the collection.
As we conduct research, make plans, and learn more about Marguerite Hicks and her Collection, we will us this blog to share parts of our journey. You will also find posts here from other members of our research team, including our student researchers.
The Marguerite Hicks Project is supported by the following:
Oakland University Research Committee Grant
Bibliographical Society of America, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Grant
Princeton University Library Grant
We are also greatly indebted to Dominique Daniel, Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections at Kresge Library, and the Detroit Public Library for their support of, and collaboration with this project.
