"...in my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace,"
Untangling the public domain via Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, & more; plus Cita news & events
Last month on social media, we highlighted some of the books and artworks that entered the public domain on January 1. Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Wanda Gág —there’s a lot to celebrate this year, particularly when it comes to queer feminist classics!
The public domain is the well from which we draw most of the Cita Press catalog. Though a generous, annually replenishing resource, it can be confusing to navigate. This year, I (Jessi) took some wrong turns on my research journey to what was new to public ownership. I even ended up including something that maybe wasn’t actually under an initial copyright in one of our posts (more on that below).
In light of this, I’m using this month’s Bulletin to dig in a little bit into the general workings of the public domain. I find the layers fascinating, if frustrating. If you want to skip to the canon and some links for resources, scroll on down. Either way, we hope you learn something interesting or useful, especially if you’re seeking inspiration from the public domain for your own creative endeavors.
First, what is the public domain?
Thousands of creative works across formats and mediums—books, images, films, music compositions, sound recordings— enter the public domain on the first day of each year. Public domain works are, in the simplest terms, owned by the public. Any previous copyright has expired, so anyone can consume, share, and adapt without getting permission.
There are three main ways that a work falls (or, as some might put it, ascends) into the public domain:
The copyright expires (for older works, the timing of this is tied to whether or not a copyright was renewed properly).
The creator decides to put it directly in the public domain (“dedication”).
The thing in question can’t be copyrighted: facts, ideas, short phrases, etc.
Characters are under the copyright of the published works in which they appear. That’s why, for example, things like horror movies about a titular honey-loving bear started popping up right after A.A. Milne’s 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh came out of copyright. As of 2022, Pooh is fair game for any kind of adaptation, even one that may cause nightmares. However, any new work trading on a character can’t feature elements tied to another, later copyright—like the red t-shirt added by the person who bought Pooh’s copyright in the 1930s. (Naked bears only until 2028!) And that distinction is just one of the many ways this all get complicated…
From publication to public ownership: a winding global journey
Laws about when certain works fall out of copyright vary by country, which can cause some confusion. Most countries base copyright term on the creator’s lifetime, meaning a person’s entire body of work comes into the public domain after a certain number of years have passed since they died. Due in large part to lobbying and protections for corporate authorship,1 the United States differs from most of the world by tying copyright term to the publication of an individual work rather than the lifetime of its creator. Copyright in the US generally expires for individual works 95 years after publication.
To illustrate what this looks like when it comes to where and when things come in to the public domain, let’s look at the bibliography of Virginia Woolf:
During her lifetime (1882-1941), Virginia Woolf published nine novels, two short story collections, three book-length essays, and two biographies2—plus dozens of short stories and essays.
In places where things enter the public domain 82 years or fewer after the author’s death (most of the world), Woolf’s entire body of work is in the public domain.
In the US, works by Woolf published before 1929 are now in the public domain. Those published after will enter individually based on the year in which they came out. To the Lighthouse last year; Orlando this year; A Room of One’s Own next year; and so on.
Untangling US copyright before 1978: Who are these rules really for?
Because Cita Press is based in the US, we use US copyright law to determine what we can publish, and to determine what we highlight as new to the public domain each January.
There are a lot of factors that complicate the publication-plus-95-years norm. This is most apparent (and most confusing) when it comes to works published before the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect.
Here are two examples from this year’s list compilation process:
1) Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
I came into 2024 excited to celebrate Quicksand, the debut novel by Nella Larsen, as new to the public domain. I was surprised when I didn’t see it on any other lists, especially because Larsen’s second novel, Passing, has (belatedly) entered the American canon in recent years and was recently adapted into an award-winning film.
This led me down the rabbit hole of trying pinpoint exactly what the deal is with Larsen’s copyrights. Her work isn’t on Project Gutenberg, and at first I couldn’t find anything outright explaining her copyright status. Then I searched the WATCH File (Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders) database:
“Nella Larsen copyrights are believed to be in the public domain. Larsen had no children, left no identification of her extended family, and her only sibling, now deceased, denied knowledge of her existence [correspondence file in the US WATCH Office].”
This still-not-definitive determination—which is both deeply personal and coldly official — illustrates the challenges of confirming the copyright status of many works published before 1978. Thousands of books by authors without fame or resources were not published with a valid copyright notice to begin with, or their copyrights weren’t renewed properly.3 When trying to determine the status for specific works, it can be hard to come to a firm conclusions, even for someone with posthumous fame like Larsen, which is why there are measures in place to account for “reasonable effort.”
Nella Larsen was a remarkable writer and figure, but layered systemic factors (particularly race and gender) impacted the course of her career and her economic and family status at the end of her life. Her books live on today, but she likely stopped benefiting materially from their publication many years before her death. The story of her copyrights, perhaps a parallel to the story of her life, leads to larger questions about who benefits from the convoluted history of US copyright law.
2) Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes
I also looked up modernist writer and queer icon Djuna Barnes in WATCH while working on our list. However, I missed that the copyright for one of her two 1928 books is a little murky. Thus, where my research excluded Quicksand from Cita’s roundup, Ladies Almanack snuck in.
Ladies Almanack is a wild, gossipy romp through the lesbian salon scene in Paris, illustrated by woodcuts by the author. Barnes originally intended the book to circulate only within the social circle that inspired its characters, so it seems she didn’t actually copyright the text.4 I can’t find anything definitive online, but my guess is that the first, privately printed edition is public domain (and has been for a long time), but that the copyright for the 1972 facsimile function as a default due to the limited availability of the former. I’m not sure how that works in practice when it comes to sharing and using the text, but I’ve reached out to both agencies that handle Barnes’ rights. If I eventually get an answer, I’ll put an update in a comment on this post.
“…in my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace, it was not then as it is now, chic and pointless to a degree, but as daring as a Crusade, for where now it leaves a woman talkative, so that we have not a Secret among us, then it left her in Tears and Trepidation.”
-Ladies Almanack, Djuna Barnes
Further exploration
These resources are great for learning about the public domain and copyright law, and for discovering works and creators:
Wikipedia houses handy pages for each year in the public domain, organizing the information by applicable copyright term, genre, and country of the creator.
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law School shares legal explanations, publications, and webcasts.
The Public Domain Review puts out an annual advent calendar featuring daily highlights of what will be new to the public domain in the approaching year.
Cita has two particularly relevant Are.na channels:
Copyright research tools: includes aforementioned WATCH File & more.
New to the public domain: all of our highlights from 2022-2024.
Cita Canon Spotlight
This month, our spotlight shines on three women whose legacies exemplify our canon and the complicated web of copyright law: authors Djuna Barnes and Nella Larsen (copyright questions discussed above) and artist Miki Hayakawa.
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was an American artist, illustrator, writer, journalist and writer. She grew up in an unconventional, often tumultuous household that was artistic but had no emphasis on formal education. She famously told her first employer: “I can draw and write, and you'd be a fool not to hire me.” Her most famous novel, Nightwood, was an avant-garde exploration of expat life in Paris and one of the few novels of its time to explicitly reference homosexuality. Dylan Thomas famously called it “one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman” (🙄). [Ruth Joffre on Djuna Barnes for Literary Hub]
Painter and printmaker Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953) emigrated from Japan to California as a child. By age 30 she had her first solo exhibition and her work was featured in the inaugural exhibit of the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1935. Hayakawa moved to New Mexico under unclear circumstances after 1942 (her parents were incarcerated in an internment camp, but there is no confirmation that she was), and she became heavily involved in the art scene there. She is considered one of the most visible and acclaimed Japanese American artists of her era. Her work has slowly returned to public consciousness in recent years, but, despite her success, she doesn’t currently have her own Wikipedia page! It seems that her work is now in the public domain in countries with a term of life plus seventy years, but the relative void of visibility here makes that hard to confirm. [Miki Hayakawa in Densho Encyclopedia]
A novelist, nurse, and librarian, Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen (1891-1964) was a keen observer of the often blurred lines that dictate the flow of power in society. In 1930, Larsen became the first African American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Though she disappeared from the literary scene not long after that, her work continues to speak to readers through its frank, beautifully rendered interrogations of race, gender, sexuality, and class. In 2021, Rebecca Hall wrote and directed an adaptation of her most famous novel, Passing, for Netflix. [Nella Larsen and Passsing in NYPL’s Collections]
“Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”
- Nella Larsen
What else?
Speaking of the public domain, Cita’s design director and founder, Juliana Castro Varón, participated in the Internet Archive’s Public Domain Day celebrations last week! Read an overview and/or listen to her talk about AI, creativity, and the importance of valuing and protecting human labor here. ALSO:
See Juliana predict the future with other Fellows from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. Or, watch her keynote speech on image manipulation at the 2023 IAPP Europe Data Protection Congress in Brussels.
Poet, essayist, and biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle interviewed me for her fantastic newsletter Finding Lost Voices. Iris describes how she used Cita with her creative writing students as they wrote mini-biographies in the style of Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives. Thank you to Iris—for profiling Cita and for inviting me to connect with your awesome students!
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Stay tuned for news about our forthcoming reading companion to An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far.
A woodcut illustration from the first edition of Ladies Almanack featuring hand-coloring by Djuna Barnes.
“Corporate authorship” = works made for hire. The 1998 Copyright Extension Act—which led to a twenty-year void of things entering the public domain in the US—is often referred to as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” due to Disney’s role in pushing for the law. “Steamboat Willie” (the debut of Mickey) finally entered the public domain in 2024.
Flush, Woolf’s 1933 hybrid text about Elizabeth Barret Browning (told from the point of view of Browning’s dog) is counted as a biography here…
The Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 removed the copyright renewal registration requirement for works published on or before 1964. Works published before 1964 are in the public domain if their copyrights were not registered for renewal with the US Copyright Office 28 years after publication.