A Quiet Game and Other Early Works by Margaret Atwood, and: My Angria and the Angrians by Charlotte Brontë, and: Embryo Words: Margaret Laurence’s Early Writings by Margaret Laurence

Abstract

ESC 26, 2000 to situate present work in the context of the past; perhaps that is one of the things Lecker means by “canonical anxieties” (vii). Such anxieties may be the result of the academic debates about canon that have gone on for some time now, or (as I think more likely) they may have deeper economic and political roots and be symptomatic of a loss of confidence in English-Canadian culture itself. The paradox that Lecker’s bibliography should present evidence of such a lot of literary activity in the 1990s and yet prompt such gloomy reflections makes it a document for our times. WORKS CITED Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1934. 13-22. Sutherland, Fraser. “A Vat of Verse: Facts and Observations from a Box of Poetry.” Globe and Mail 20 Feb. 1999, natl. ed.: D12. PAUL DENHAM / University of Saskatchewan Margaret Atwood. A Quiet Game and Other Early Works, edit­ ed by Kathy Chung and Sherrill Grace. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1997. xv, 27. $8.00 paper; Charlotte Bronte. My Angria and the Angrians, edited by Juliet McMaster, Leslie Robertson, and the students of English 672 at the University of Alberta. Edmonton: Juvenilia Press, 1997. xxii, 86. $8.00 paper; and Margaret Laurence. Embryo Words: Margaret Laurence’s Early Writings, edited by Nora Foster Stovel et al. Edmonton: Juve­ nilia Press, 1997. xxiv, 67. $8.00 paper. Juliet McMaster’s Juvenilia Press, founded in 1992, has now produced almost twenty volumes. This is an impressive achieve­ ment for a project that (as she described it in English Studies in Canada in 1996) began with an undergraduate English class edition of Jane Austen’s Jack and Alice and has gone on to in­ clude scholars and students outside of the University of Alberta 366 REVIEWS and texts ranging from Ashford to Atwood. Its primary goal was pedagogical, and “student involvement was of the essence of the project” (9). The intention, however, was also to make avail­ able “the early work of known writers” with an introduction that relates the text to the author’s mature work, annotations that provide scholarly background and commentary, and ama­ teur illustrations that maintain the deliberately “light-hearted” flavour of the enterprise (13). The group of essays that appeared in English Studies in Canada in 1998 further elaborates and theorizes the work o f this unique and innovative Press. The edition of My Angria and the Angrians, written by Charlotte Bronte in 1834 at age eighteen, supervised by Juliet McMaster, introduced by Leslie Robertson (assistant editor of the Press), and annotated by the students of English 672 at the University of Alberta, is a representative volume in this se­ ries. McMaster’s Preface situates this text within the personal and fictional worlds of the imaginative Bronte children. Robert­ son’s Introduction analyses the biographical background, theo­ rizes (using Edward Said) the British imperialism of this repre­ sentation of Africa and critiques the connections between this self-indulgent romance and Bronte’s controlled, mature realism. The 159 student annotations occasionally verge on pedantry but provide a generally useful reference to the Brontes’s biograph­ ical allusions and (along with the “Family Trees” ) to “the An­ grians’ tortuously complex familial relationships” (63). The il­ lustrations and illuminated capitals are appropriately childlike. Typically of this series, the fifty-nine page text is not it­ self the result of original editing; it uses as a copy-text Chris­ tine Alexander’s An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte (1991). This novella presents the melodramatic story of a brooding Byronic hero, his aristocratic liaisons, and po­ litical intrigues through a nine-year-old narrator who sounds like a middle-aged wordsmith. Despite the obvious weaknesses of this text, some interesting examples of parody, satire, and gothic horror reveal the literary potential of the young Char­ lotte Bronte. However, although in her Introduction Robertson relied on the apprenticeship model, in her recent article she makes a good case for revisioning this novel, not as a “mere 367 ESC 26, 2000 apprentice work” (298), but as an important form of “play” whereby the Bronte children asserted mastery over their world. More clearly...