The librarian delivered the stack of notebooks to my desk, and I skimmed them to find her last poem, a slim volume bound in brown cloth, which when I opened it revealed another cover in a sanguine red, Rossetti’s original notebook. In contrast to some of her early manuscripts, which were carefully copied in a formal hand, “Sleeping at Last” seemed casual and dashed off, the letters less even, as if the poet didn’t care as much for appearances when she got older. As I suspected, she used ampersands throughout the poem, which were converted to “and”s when her brother William Michael Rossetti published it after her death. Though when rendered in manuscript, her ampersands veered sideways and weren’t those formal, erect &s they became in print. So by the time I got to the last lines, “Singing birds in their leafy cover / Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast. / Under the purple thyme & the purple clover / Sleeping at last,” that last ampersand no longer conveyed the feeling of being trapped like I once argued in a paper. If anything, it just felt like she had done what she needed to do and was ready to rest. I experienced another surge of affinity with her, how tired I was of leading my life to be judged appealing to others. But the thought of letting go felt impossible, when it was that superficial image of myself as a beautiful, sophisticated white man that kept me from sinking into despair.

I ordered many other manuscripts the rest of the week, favorites like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who both had exquisite handwriting, unlike Virginia Woolf, who was almost illegible, and was one of the first authors to switch to a typewriter. It felt so indulgent to have access to every manuscript in the BL’s collection, and I spent many hours daydreaming about the lives of those women, their struggles and their brilliance. I’d grown into a hearty feminist by then, fed with French theorists like Cixous and Irigaray, along with Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which described the BL’s main reading room as resembling the head of a bald British man, its perimeter lined with the names of famous thinkers throughout history, none of them women. Having grown up with no notion that women were in any way inferior—the president who took over from our dictator a woman, my grandmother fully equal to my grandfather in terms of running their business affairs, an indigenous culture that did not promote the idea of male superiority except for the colonial influence of machismo—the idea of women being kept out of intellectual pursuits simply because of their gender was infuriating, and studying their efforts to produce art under these conditions enraptured me.