## About the Project

Acknowledgements

### The Gaskell Diary Digital Edition

About the Digital Edition: My digital dissertation project, “‘The Music of [Our] Thoughts’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Motherhood Diary, A Digital Edition” is the first born-digital dissertation in MSU's English Department, and offers readers and scholars alike digital access to Gaskell’s manuscript for the first time. Poised at the intersection of Victorian studies, digital humanities, textual scholarship and motherhood studies, this digital edition will offer a richly contextualized transcript, fully hand-encoded in TEI-XML according to the latest P5 guidelines, presented in conjunction with annotations, high-quality IIIF images of the manuscript pages, and critical essays.

Gaskell has traditionally been recognized for the clarity of social vision presented in her novels, yet the diary shows her constant indecision and self-doubt in her role as a mother. Historically treated as an “apprenticeship” text that reveals Gaskell’s talent at characterization, this edition aims to reevaluate the diary not as a precursor to the novels, but as a vibrant, rich text in which Gaskell grappled with a broader social vision of what it meant to be a Victorian wife and mother. The resulting Edition, which grows out of MSU’s vibrant community of cutting-edge DH researchers and spaces, ultimately invites us to reimagine and reframe the fluctuations of the mutual identity formations at work in the mother-daughter relationship inscribed in the text, reimagining the nineteenth century maternal diary as a collaborative genre of self-narrative.