The Tag Glossary: M

This element belongs conceptually within WRITING > PRODUCTION. It details the pre-publication or unpublished history of a text: where it was kept, how and if it circulated before and after its printing. This element incorporates a statement or discussion; note that it refers to the circulation of the manuscript and not the published text, and covers matters like ownership, damage, loss and recovery. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements or attributes.

The MARRIAGE sub-element (within MEMBER within FAMILY in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries) is used to capture the event of a person's wedding ceremony or basic facts about her marriage. It has its own DIV2 and CHRONSTRUCT if needed. Marriage is often a central and defining moment in a woman writer's life and we want to systematize this event. Because of the institutional definition of marriage, we want to separate out the legal act of marriage from the details of married life. For this reason, this element is not used for a detailed discussion of her married life but such discussions are placed within the general FAMILY/MEMBER=Husband element. We try (but don’t always succeed) to use this tag for the event of marriage with subsequent changes, rather than for decades of married life. Successive marriages and spouses may occupy separate DIV2s, or occasionally the same one if little detail is available.

The MARRIED element within PERSONNAME (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries) captures the surname that a woman adopted in marriage. It occupies a DATAITEM tag and encloses the name only. It has attributes of REG (to use in the case of variant spellings) and WROTEORPUBLISHEDAS. We are interested in tracking to what extent women adopted their married names for publishing. However, Orlando has sometimes tagged her husband’s name as the MARRIED name of a writer without positive evidence that she did in fact use his name.

This tag is found in WRITING > PRODUCTION. This tag describes the physical and economic circumstances that governed a woman's writing or a particular text. This category is meant to answer questions like: did she have a room of her own? Was it the laundry room or a posh cabin on the French Riviera? Was she losing her eyesight while writing a particular work? Did she hide the manuscript while writing? This element encloses a full sentence or clause. It has no mandatory or optional sub-elements, but one optional attribute, DISPLACEMENT, with a value of DisplacementYes. This might signify migration, or moving out of her home because of marital troubles or failure to pay the rent.

MEMBER is a significant sub-element within FAMILY (in the BIOGRAPHY section of entries), enclosing its own DIV2 and other structural tags. It has a required attribute, RELATION, and sub-elements MARRIAGE, JOB, and SIGNIFICANTACTIVITY. It captures a discussion of a specific family member (who was important/significant to the writer). MEMBER allows us to structure information concerning particular family relations. For example, by including a MEMBER element for the mother of a British woman writer, we will be able to generate a list for our end users of all the jobs of or all the comments on these mothers. We hope to make interesting connections between women writers’ relationships to particular family members (for example, group information concerning the relationship of eighteenth-century women writers to their aunts) but in order to do so we must systematize the discussions of these specific members. One member tag is used for several brothers or several sisters or children if not very much is said; for more detail an individual tag is used. Optional tags include JOB and SIGNIFICANTACTIVITY.

PMODEOFPUBLICATION is connected to WRITING > PRODUCTION. It deals with specific ways in which a book is brought to print; it does not address issues of circulation. It captures specific issues around the publisher (or details about the printer where pertinent and different from the publisher) through capturing particulars of specified types of publishing. It encloses full sentences, with enough information to convey the issues at stake. The attribute values on this tag cover limited, pirated, or private editions, publishing by subscription, and self-publishing. Other publishing issues call for other tags: PTYPEOFPRESS, PRELATIONSHIPWITHPUBLISHER, PEARNINGS, etc. This element has no mandatory or optional sub-elements.

A note on self-publication: this attribute doesn't refer only to those works published by vanity presses (or, today, independently on the web). In some cases, where the title page bears the words Printed [sometimes published] for the author, it means that the publisher wouldn't take the risk, so charged the author for publication and any profits then went to her. It was a sign of the author's confidence in her own work and could work out very well financially, or not. 

The motif element pertains to those discussions of a significant scene, episode, or idea in the text where these are not coterminal with the entire text. Motifs are localized or contained within the plot and may recur in multiple works or multiple times in the same work.

This term is available within BIOGRAPHY or WRITING > PRODUCTION. It describes a woman writer's purposes and reasons for writing (or choosing a particular genre or theme) which may be ascribed or self-identified, and may refer to textual motives or personal motives. See ATTITUDES for comparison. Material for this tag relies on sentiments expressed by the writer or the opinions of others (see Attribute values), or else on reasonable deduction. It has one optional attribute, MOTIVETYPE, with values of ascribed and self-identified.