The Ambiguous Construction of a Modern Melancholic Self: Evanthia Kairi’s Correspondence, 1814–1866

Abstract

Evanthia Kairi was an author and literary woman who lived during the first half
of the nineteenth century (1799–1868). She produced few literary works but left a rich
correspondence covering the period from 1814 to 1866; most of her letters are addressed to
her elder brother, the priest, philosopher and revolutionary Theophilos Kairis. Generally
based on a nineteenth-century perception of melancholy as a romantic, dark, often
pathological, condition, that related particularly to women, contemporary historiography
considers her as an altogether idiosyncratic, solitary and melancholic intellectual. This
article ventures to propose an anatomy of Kairi’s melancholic discourse in the light of a
modern “active sensibility”, that is, as a procedure of construction and deconstruction of
a modern virtuous self through different life narratives: her moral shaping and education
in modern virtues, her strict and complex pattern of social and affective exchanges within
the family and her language of solitariness.