89 rehabilitateBurkebyprivilegingOnConciliation , his earlier speech about the American colonies, over the manifest conservatism of Reflections on the Revolution in France, attempts to discredit ‘‘the stigmatic view’’ of the subscribers to Sir Edward Thompson’s 1776 edition of Marvell’s Works ‘‘that entered our systems of value with the work of Pierre Legouis ,’’ skirmishes with John Barrell and David Solkin in order to ‘‘recover the Whig in Reynolds,’’reintroduces ‘‘one of the greatest liberal barristers in English history,’’ Thomas Erskine, for the highly unlikely reason that ‘‘he seems to be in danger of vanishing from the record’’and reconsiders The Prelude ‘‘in its various stages of composition’’ to ask whether Wordsworth ever really abandoned his youthful radicalism. J. A. Downie Goldsmiths College, University of London PETER BORSAY. The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700–2000: Towns, Heritage, and History. Oxford, 2000. Pp. xv ⫹ 434.£60. Illusory representations of Bath’s Georgian past (1700–1830) have helped various elites determine theirownpresent and preserve ‘‘substantial parts of the eighteenth-century urban landscape.’’ Mr. Borsay argues that this ‘‘mythic material ’’ has been generated by and still dominates popular media because it is needed by those who disseminate and accept it. A Hegelian idea thatpublicly-accepted stories about the past are what transform the present controls the way Mr. Borsay organizes and discusses Bath’s historiography . The body of the book is a compendium of literary texts; biographical legends; innovative architectural, sociological and economic studies;andliterary histories. Mr. Borsay investigates which oneschanged‘‘prevailing’’waysofimagining Georgian Bath. The book’s lack of agency extends to Mr. Borsay’s way of covering telling political battles in Bath from the later nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century between conservationists and the city’s governing councils, and opposing classes of residents and visitors over what to do with ruins and run-down buildings. After decades of indifference, an aggressive campaign restored the Georgian ‘‘shrines’’in the 1970s and led to the way all of Georgian Bath is now treated by the heritage industry and its commercial reinforcements . Reconstructions destroy existing structures and replace them with materials and internal organizations of space that allow for new uses of space which, like the earlier Georgian interiors, do not correspond to uniform facades,but now can function as time capsules. An allegiance to the beauty of classical architecture colors the text. Mr. Borsay treats as passing trends and ‘‘sheer effrontery ’’ irreverent but also serious suggestions on the part of unnamed people, whose letters appeared in the local Bath press, that money to renovate ‘‘elite’’ structures (the Assembly Rooms) should instead be used to improve life for the average person in Bath. The adversarial criticism and strong distaste for the eighteenth-century spa in numbers of key eighteenth-century texts is simply dubbed ‘‘somewhat surprizing.’’Mr.Borsay repeatedly quotes as authoritativeand balanced Horace Annesley Vachell’s narrowly bourgeois and genteel, ‘‘[Georgian ] Bath belongs to the world.’’ At the same time, much evidence reveals that the image of Georgian Bath ‘‘encodes’’ a complicated cult, participation in which bestows status. Characters 90 and images cherished by some groups of people for others symbolize their own or a previous generation’s deprivation and hidden injuries of class. Mr. Borsay catalogues historical personages chosen and omitted from representations and retells quarrels over what elementsinBath’shistory to present and when. He describes how the organization of space in Bath works to separate, stigmatize, exclude, and elevate people. This book is a postmodern encyclopedia of almost all the sources of the historiography of Georgian Bath. We are shown how difficult it is to alter popular romance, guidebooks, and ‘‘common knowledge’’by accurate information gleaned from primary documents. Thus Mr. Borsay comes to think that Bath today is the product of the images through which people have experienced it. This study represents a missed opportunity and worthy project gone awry. Mr. Borsay’s earlier comprehensive study, The English Urban Renaissance, 1660– 1770, showsno doubt thataccuratescholarship is possible and can function usefully beyond the small circle of people who might read it through. The present ends by arguing that Georgian Bath’s ‘‘national heritage of beauty’’ has lasted because it ‘‘consoles’’ and ‘‘comforts’’ ‘‘people’’as an element in theiridentities, and that late...
Jane Couchman and Ann M. Crabb, eds. Women’s Letters across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. viii + 336 pp. index. illus. bibl. $94.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5106-X. - Volume 59 Issue 3
58 early modern political theory was constructed .’’ Two surprising gaps in the Companion affect the 1660–1700 period especially. One is the lack of a chapter on translation, which (the editor points out) played ‘‘a vital role in the establishment of early modern female literary culture.’’ Translations by Hutchinson, Philips, and Behn, among others, contributed materially to that culture but get short shrift in this volume . The brevity of discussion of female friendship, erotic or companionate (two paragraphs only, both relating to Katherine Philips), is unfortunate also; this was a topos (and factor) of no small significance in the development of seventeenth-century women’s writing, as some modern studies have shown. Karina Williamson University of Edinburgh ANNE KELLEY. Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism. Hampshire, England: Ashgate , 2002. Pp. vi ⫹ 279. $79.95. In a combative book, Ms. Kelley surveys Trotter’s reputation, texts, and career in order to prove that this ‘‘early modern writer’’ is not ‘‘obscure, dull and narrow-minded’’and to ‘‘reposition [her] as a radical feminocentric writer.’’ Relentlessly defensive, Ms. Kelley hardly concedes that Trotter could have misunderstood something or that her texts have flaws. The inflexible tone which she attributes to Trotter replaces an older distortion with a new unreal singlemindedness . Throughout, consistency and a prudential feminism that eschews sexual unconventionality are virtues in themselves. Ms. Kelley argues that ‘‘the school of feminist criticism which advocates that women rejectthetraditionalrationalmale discourse as part of the phallocentric structure in favour of a more emotional writing based on the female body’’ is ‘‘simplistic,’’ returns women to society’s ‘‘margins,’’and deprives them of respect. For her, Trotter’s ‘‘unwavering’’ adherence to ‘‘rational morality’’providesasolution for complicated human dilemmas and will be taken seriously in public debate . Trotter is ‘‘adamantly opposed’’ to positions other than her own: Trotter’s seemingly tireless rebuttals in her argumentative essays of writers who attacked Locke and Samuel Clarke are presented as solely a matter of her holding on to an argument. Trotter’s ‘‘project [is] to demonstrate that women [can] speak with intellectual authority.’’ Trotter never deviates from a feminist pragmatism that allows a woman to yield to her body’s urges only insofar as is consistent with a self-controlled resolvetoavoidsocialdisapproval . Female characters who think in the ‘‘rational’’ way men do show women how to be powerful. Trotter’s texts are flattened, and outrageous emotional convolutions and logical perversities praised. We aretoadmire The Unhappy Penitent (1701) because its heroine demands that the hero obey what he has contracted to do no matter what the result; The Revolution of Sweden (1706) is praised because its heroine ‘‘prioritises the welfare of her country over her personal feeling’’ (and ends up murdered for her pains). Ms. Kelley dismisses those readers who find lesbianism in Trotter and Sarah Lady Piers’s correspondence and Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1696); I suggest we can make poignant moral sense of this tragedy by paying attention to the profound revulsion against coerced heterosexual contact that fills the 59 soliloquies of all the women charactersin Trotter’s plays who, as Ms. Kelley says, turn to other women for support and comfort . Ms. Kelley mischaracterizes Piers’s letters to the young Trotter when she says the affection displayed is ‘‘rhetorical rather than literal.’’ Piers’s letters jar the reader with the writer’s awkward apologies as she voices her passionate inability to stopherselffromutteringwhatshesays Trotter will see as a transgression. Behind Trotter’s repetitiveness, abstraction from experience, and austere impersonality is a woman who endured ridicule, low status, and, in reaction, was inclined to sudden identifications with admired people and passionate loyalties. In her youth, she converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and back again; in her later years, she writes as a woman who married because she had to and has lived in isolatedpoverty;thestrainedcontent of her essays represents her way of asserting a barricaded self-respect. Her letters reveal the limited choices and rejections her position inflicted on her. Ms. Kelley analyzes a poem to reveal that Trotter identified with ‘‘the dilemma faced by poor and obscure men like [Stephen ] Duck,’’ but fails to connect this identification with Trotter’s intense presentation of her self...
An account of a group discussion of a number of Trollope's work on Trolope-l, the Internet discussion group devoted to his study. It includes Claverings, Lady Anna, Golden Lion of Granpere and Way We Live Now, commenting on their form, content, structure, detail and meaning. The book reports the Internet discussions and the nature of the work summarized by the group, which is seen by the author to be both serious and informal, mostly harmonious but with occasional tensions.
There is a curious lacuna in Jane Austen studies one would have thought had been filled long ago. No-one has as yet drawn out and explained the chronology of Sense and Sensibility. From Austen's other five novels scholars have educed detailed calendars most of her readers have accepted as really in Austen's novels because these have explained hitherto puzzling elements in her novels. Only Sense and Sensibility has been left out.(1) There has been one brief attempt to draw out the chronology of Sense and Sensibility, Patricia Craddock's Almanac of Sense and Sensibility.(2) Craddock did not carry her project through consistently or thoroughly. Throughout most of her essay she remains undecided between wide-ranging pairs of years (1794-95, 1797-98, 1800-1, and 1805-6). When, at the end of her piece, she suddenly dates the Easter of the novel as 31 March, as this date enables her to suggest the calendar of Sense and Sensibility as we now have it was based on a 1792-93 almanac, she ignores the fact that the dates we have for the Juvenilia are precisely these and that the Juvenilia are the work of a much younger mind.(3) She also does not cite Austen's sister, Cassandra's memorandum, in which, if Cassandra is somewhat vague about the date of an earlier of the book, she nonetheless most decisively said: am sure something of the same story & characters had been written earlier & called Elinor and Marianne, and that Sense and Sensibility we have is a text begun Nov. 1797.(4) More importantly -- for the whole point of a calender is to explain what we have in Austen's text -- Craddock does not check to see if and how this date coheres with various other quite definite indications of time the novel offers. She never stops to examine exactly how many years the action of this novel circumscribes. Nonetheless, when at the opening of her essay Patricia Craddock asserts that her examination of the underlying calendar for Sense and Sensibility made her sense what she had found was the early of a previous version of this novel, she was correct. I have already quoted Cassandra's decisive comment that Sense and Sensibility existed in an earlier called Elinor and Marianne. To this I add the characteristically modest, and carefully-qualified, but determined statement Austen's niece, Caroline Austen made in 1869 that Sense and Sensibility was first told in letters: Memory is treacherous, but I cannot be mistaken in saying that Sense and Sensibility was first written in letters, and so read to her family. The problem Craddock had was that she felt she could only assert that the time-scheme in several different sections of the novel shows the novel we have closely resembles that of the year of the original epistolary of the novel, 1795. Thus she only begs the key question of what this epistolary was like. Craddock makes even less of an effort than Brian Southam in his brief and somewhat half-hearted reconstruction of who wrote to whom.(5) Like Southam and others who have wanted to discuss what the earlier of the book may have been like in order to shed light on the present version, she probably felt herself unable to figure out who wrote to whom. My counter argument is that the sort of specific details of who wrote to whom are not important because they are not indications that we have an epistolary narrative. There have always been and will continue to be countless omniscient novels in which characters write letters to one another from different places, and in which such letters may be crucial to the plot or revelation of character.(6) What marks Sense and Sensibility as epistolary is what in her seminal book on epistolary narrative, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Janet Gurkin Altman calls epistolarity by which she means the use of certain complex formal properties which are fundamental to the structure of the plot or story of the novel: multiple plots, disruption of the temporal line by nonchronological ordering, multiple correspondents (each character giving different coloring to a story), and lacunae (the punctuation of a story with letters and the use of intervals between letters in which further meaningful events happen). …
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