Interview with a Literally 'It Girl': Susan Tomlinson

You have an impressive and diverse literary background! Right now you're serving as an editor for Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. What drew you to this work, and what do you love most about it?

I stepped down as Legacy’s editor two years ago—thanks for reminding me to update my faculty profile! Becoming an editor still feels like a twist of fate because I’d never thought about being one. Legacy found me; after publishing my first article, the then-editor invited me to be a peer reviewer, and the next editor appointed me to the editorial board. I was shocked when the next editor asked me to be a coeditor and even more so when she stepped down and asked me to be the editor. My favorite role was coeditor because it immersed me in other scholars’ ideas and critical perspectives, and I loved collaborating with authors to make their work clearer and stronger. I always liken it to yoga—getting to the fullest expression of an idea instead of a pose.

Being the senior editor meant less hands-on scholarly work because it focused on the business side. I already knew the editorial side, but working with my production colleagues who transformed the contents of Dropbox folders into actual journal issues was incredible. My favorite part about being the editor was knowing the history behind every article we published—the work between the original version the author sent and the one we accepted, the stages between that version and the one I sent to press, and the final stages that resulted in its bound and digital version—and the role every person played in making it happen. I also loved getting to know the authors, sometimes when they were nervous graduate students submitting their first manuscripts. When we see each other at conferences, some of them are tenured professors, and all of them are changing the field. 

What makes you stop and really pay attention to a piece of writing and make you say, 'this is it'?

Details so precise that it shifts the way I see the world. George Eliot’s last paragraph in Middlemarch—her address to the reader as “you and me,” the integrity of her language, the “unvisited tombs”— undoes and resuscitates me every time I read it.

As someone who studies and teaches women from literary past, what do you think writers today can learn from Wharton and other women in the literary canon?

Authors like Edith Wharton and Pauline Hopkins teach abstraction, how to listen for voice and sensibility, how to think about ideas. At the sentence level they teach proportion and words beyond the ones we use every day—not to throw around but to imbibe.

If you could sit down with any woman writer from history, who would it be? What would you say?

Jessie Fauset. I wish we could meet in Paris and spend the day at her favorite café, from coffee in the morning through lunch in the afternoon and tea or something stronger later on. I’d tell her that her novels are more popular than ever—read, taught, talked and written about—and that 21st-century readers are finally ready for her. But I’d really just want to listen to everything she’d say. And maybe look at accessories together; she wore the most fabulous shoes in her full-length photos, and I’d love to watch her pick things out and inspect them.

When you're not immersed in late 19th and early 20th century literature, what books do you enjoy? Are there any you're reading currently?

I find author biographies irresistible, mostly for the gossip and self-destructiveness, and gory mysteries set in smug villages. I’ve just started Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene by Deborah Barker. Greene was the shrewd, outrageously glamorous curator and first director of the Morgan Library; she crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, building most of the Morgan’s permanent collection and soaking up art and other pleasures with her lover Bernard Berenson. Her father was Harvard’s first African American graduate. His plaque is just to the right of the Coop’s main entrance.

Do you remember the first woman writer that made you fall in love with literature?

I loved Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was the first long novel I read. But Andrea Lee changed everything. She’s published five books so far and still writes for the New Yorker and Vogue. A family friend gave me a copy of her first novel, Sarah Phillips, and it was the first time I completely identified with a character’s sensibility. Reading a book narrated by a character whose experiences and perceptions were so similar to mine when I was a teenager—and uncannily similar to experiences I would have later on—meant I wasn’t an anomaly. I reread the whole novel and individual chapters over and over, relishing Lee’s depiction of Sarah’s teenage world-weariness, her by turns attachment to and rebellion from propriety, and her determination to be difficult. Lee’s representation of ambiguity is enthralling; she’s the first author who made me ask, “How’d she do that?”