'Apparitions, and Ghosts': H(a)unting Donne's Letters

ABSTRACT

This paper is part of a Literature Compass panel cluster on the forthcoming Oxford edition of Donne's letters.

Margaret Maurer introduces the cluster which offers papers by the three editors and seeks to examine the new directions the edition will pursue. The papers were originally delivered to the members of the John Donne Society in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in February 2008.

The cluster is made up of the following articles:

'The Oxford Edition of Donne's Letters: Well Underway', Margaret Maurer, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'"Apparitions, and Ghosts": H(a)unting Donne's Letters', M. Thomas Hester, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'"Only in Obedience" to Whom? – The Identity of a Donne Correspondent', Dennis Flynn, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

'Problems in Editing John Donne's Letters: Unreliable Primary Materials', Ernest W. Sullivan, II, Literature Compass 5 (2008), [DOI link].

***

One way in which we might (in part) approach the problem of establishing the canon of Donne's familiar letters is indicated through a brief review of two of what Donne called his epistolary 'apparitions, and ghosts'– letters lacking 'a convenient handsome body of news. . . . spun out of nothing' (Letters 121), two letters, that is, that lack (or at first hand seem to lack) any substantial internal data beyond their style that would identify them as Donne's: (a) his problematic letter 'To the Lady G.' (first printed in Marriott's 1635 Poems); and (b) the transcription of the unsigned, unaddressed, and undated 'I promised a iorney' in the even more problematic 'Burley MS'. An examination of the approach of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of the first letter provides an example of how we can determine Donne's authorship of the second letter through particular attention to the style of these two representative letters.