In my archival encounters with letters, diaries, and fragments of women’s writings, I have searched for ways of attending to the multiplicity of voices that emerge in the act of narrating a life. Out of this work, I have developed the notion of narrative personae—a conceptual tool for tracing how women have written themselves across shifting registers of voice, role, and relation.

This formulation is indebted to two sources of inspiration. From Deleuze and Guattari, I take the figure of the conceptual persona—that creative force which accompanies the philosopher, opening up new planes of thought. Conceptual personae are not the philosopher’s mask; they are the dramatis personae of philosophy itself, shaping what thinking can become. From Arendt, I take the idea of the persona as the worldly face through which one appears in public, bound up with the fragile conditions of plurality and recognition.

My work on narrative personae brings these two trajectories into the space of women’s life-writing. In letters or autobiographical fragments, women are not simply “expressing themselves.” Rather, they are composing figures of selfhood that are at once intimate and public, singular and collective. Narrative personae emerge in this tension: they are created in the act of narration, but they are also relational, produced in response to interlocutors, conventions, and the social conditions of their time.

Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari allows me to recognize the generative and inventive aspect of these personae—life-writing as a laboratory of becoming. Thinking with Arendt reminds me that these personae are also fragile, situated in webs of relations where speech and appearance are precarious.

To speak of narrative personae is therefore to resist any singular or unified notion of subjectivity. Instead, it is to attend to the plurality of figures through which women have narrated themselves into the world. It is a feminist move, but also a philosophical one: to recognize that the self is always a composition, always in movement, always more than one.

Reading Kassia and Hildegard together resists a linear canon of “great women composers.” Instead, they form archival personae in counterpoint, opening an assemblage of traces, voices, and silences. Their legacies do not resolve into singular identities; they remain resistant, calling for careful listening and feminist refiguration.

This is why I turn to the notion of narrative personae in the archive: it allows us to approach women’s musical histories not as a project of recovering lost individuals, but as a practice of tracing figures who emerge in the interplay of text, music, and memory. Kassia and Hildegard mark the beginning of such a genealogy—not as origins, but as openings, genealogical emergences par excellence.