Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 ed. by Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder, and David Holton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013 ed. by Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder, and David Holton Churnjeet Mahn (bio) Eleni Papargyriou, Semele Assinder, and David Holton, editors, Greece in British Women's Literary Imagination, 1913–2013. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2017. Pp. viii+ 175. Hardback €92.95. This edited collection sets out to chart a distinct shift in British women's writing about Greece in the twentieth century. The shift from the imaginative or allegorical possibilities of engaging with Greece and its classical past, to an interest in more contemporary history, politics and, romance, is thoroughly evidenced throughout the chapters. The introduction offers an overview of the Hellas/Greece divide, charting familiar territory on key figures such as Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf, to how the waning importance of the classics as a benchmark for culture and civilization led to learning Ancient Greek or travelling to Greece no longer carrying the same kind of exceptional cultural cachet. Semele Assinder's discussion of Rose Macaulay's short story "The Empty Berth" opens the collection with the end of an era. Describing Macaulay's cruise to Greece in 1912 (fellow travellers included Jane Ellen Harrison), Assinder demonstrates how the boom in travel to Greece left the tourist keen to visit ruins open to a new wave of parody. In an analysis of Macaulay's story, Assinder outlines how tropes of romance and haunting in British women's writing about Greece were beginning to change, marking the beginning a new era of writing about Greece. Vassiliki Kolocotroni opens her chapter with the infamous Cambridge classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, whose appeal as everything from a centaur to a "Scholar-Gypsy" ensured that she was always an exceptional presence in the field (29). Drawing on Harrison's interest in the spectral survivals of a primitive pre-Olympian Greece, Kolocotroni traces representations of a haunted Greece in twentieth century British women's writing to analyze, "a carefully calibrated use of allegory that sets ancient shades loose from the limits of classical Greek light" (30). The chapter's strength lies tracing an evolving feminist practice that used allegories of Greece to undergird theoretical and philosophical interrogations of knowledge about place and gender. Rowena Fowler and Rose Little offer an overview of the influence of Greece in the writing of Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, two mid-twentieth century English novelists. Visiting familiar tropes in British women's writing about Greece, from the intellectual importance of learning Greek to feelings of alienation from the real site of Greece, Fowler and Little document a variety of literary strategies (including irony, parody, and adaption) that match emotional responses to a Greece which, "may both enliven and perturb" (62). Deirdre [End Page 450] David's discussion of the novelist Olivia Manning focuses on her experience of displacement and exile during World War II as she left Greece to escape the invasion. Greece, David argues, continues to have a powerful hold on Manning's literary imagination throughout her life as tropes of unattainability (the unattainability of an education in the classics, the unattainability of that time in Greece again). This is particularly significant as Manning breaks the mould of earlier British women in Greece: she is not there as a privileged traveler/tourist or wife of an official or scholar. Laura Vivanco's discussion of Mills & Boon romance novels set in Greece between 1960–2010 offers an account of the enduring romantic and sexual possibilities of a holiday to Greece, especially in a market targeted at heterosexual women. This chapter contributes to explaining how and why Greece becomes a romanticised destination and place for generations of women for whom learning Greek or a scholarly interest in the classics is not a symbol for intellectual or sexual emancipation. Ruins are relegated to the background of a heated passion for the contemporary (male) inhabitants. James Gifford's chapter on Mary Stewart's romance-mystery novels in the 1950s–60s relies on the familiar premise of Greece being used as a symbol for independence based on personal experiences of travel. The critical framework of Gifford's work relies on postcolonial theory and, "revising the critical scotoma that surrounds Hellenism...