Maria M. Scott. Re-Presenting ‘Jane’ Shore: Harlot and Heroine. Pp. viii+142. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. £40

Abstract

Who was the real Jane Shore? As in many similar typological narratives, the facts about the woman at the start of the five-centuries-long myth traced in Maria Scott's study is remarkably elusive. Even the ‘Jane’ turns out to be fictional: Edward IV's mistress, the wife of the London merchant William Shore, was actually called Elizabeth. In place of biographical recovery, then, Scott pursues her analysis of ‘re-presenting’. The Shore legend becomes an exemplary case of the appeal of ‘the erotic victim’, even as, more broadly, her representations ‘provide windows through which we may observe how our culture has fluctuated over the past four hundred years, while reminding us also about out relatively persistent fascination with sex and power’. This untheorized tension between presentism and historicization continues throughout this stimulating and frustrating book: footnotes to the introduction refer to Freud, Monica Lewinsky, and a television listing website, and explain that the author ‘will use the terms “history” and “historical” with some reservation, since their meanings are not absolute’. There is a retro-feminist feel to the parenthetical ‘herstory’, the ‘harlot/heroine archetype’, and the unexplained ‘masculinist’, and a retro-historicist tinge to the preference for ‘transgression’ and ‘foregrounding’. At the end of her account, Scott states that the Shore story proves as fallacy ‘that the further back one goes in history, the more prudish and socially conservative the society’: but since this is such a straw man argument it undermines the achievement of her work. The final paragraph of the book includes the startling phrase ‘we have changed very little since 1517’: this can hardly be said to be high-level cultural analysis.