ABSTRACT
Emily Climenson's description of her laborious task of compiling an edition of her great-great-aunt Elizabeth Montagu's correspondence surely resonates with everyone who has ever worked in archives to transcribe and order manuscript letters. Montagu's history and indeed, the cultural history of her age, is recorded and narrated in the archives of her letters. Digitization will further democratize Montagu's correspondence by making it freely available and, make it the 'predominant centre of creative processes that are deployed to make sense of human experience, cultural memory and the world in general'. The myriad of personal papers surviving outside the archives of official power, in homes, in the forms of diaries and letters, have not often been professionally curated, as was the case with official papers deposited in archives. Feminists have been in the forefront of this immense change to scholarship since the 1980s.
