There's always room for more than one book! Really!

Noah Berlatsky's Jill Lepore-inspired angst sent me back nearly twenty years to my dissertating days.  There I was, typing away at my magnum opus (hey, the dissertation did run over into a second volume), when I discovered, thanks to a newly-published article, that Rohan Maitzen had already written it.  LOLspeak did not yet exist in the mid-90s, but had it done so, I'm pretty sure that I could have said "I haz a sad" with a clear conscience.  (And many tissues.)  So I ordered her dissertation--a process that was also a bit more complicated in those days--and, with a deeply troubled heart, sat down to read it.

Whereupon I discovered that, no, we had not written the same dissertation. I had many fewer sads, although I did drop in some additional footnotes.  Nineteenth-century women's history was a) an underplumbed topic (in fact, there was a noticeable dearth of plumb at the time) with b) an awful lot of texts to discuss.  Of course we were going to come up with different texts, different approaches, and, for that matter, different interpretations.  Life, and scholarship, goes on.