Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) ed. by Melissa Mowry

Abstract

68 events and documents surrounding Swift’s efforts to secure the First Fruits and Twentieth Parts for the Church of Ireland. But never mind. I admire his nuanced, generous study anyway. John Irwin Fischer Louisiana State University Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724), ed. Melissa Mowry. Peterborough , ON: Broadview, 2009. Pp. 417. $18.95. It was not very long ago that an aspiring scholar might have proposed to a university press an edition of fiction or poetry that, while not well-known, nonetheless had genuine merit. Yet such a proposal might have been turned down because the editor contended that the market could not bear the publication of an unfamiliar work. One might justify a new edition of Robinson Crusoe, for example , but the public would surely balk at a volume devoted to Captain Singleton . Times have changed, however, and the publication of a new edition of Defoe’s Roxana bears witness to the unique niche that the Canadian publishing house, Broadview Press, has established for itself in English Studies. Its two hundred and thirty-two titles, paperback editions of works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry drawn mainly from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, range from classics like Jane Eyre or Moll Flanders to volumes that are neglected, overlooked or only survive in a single manuscript. Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue, ‘‘A Castaway,’’ has recently been rediscovered , but it is a Broadview Press edition that has made all of her once highly regarded poems newly available to the reading public. In the interest of full disclosure : I have published a volume in the Broadview Press English Studies series . The editor of the Broadview Press Roxana, Ms. Mowry is the author of the lively Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution, Ashgate, 2004 (reviewed in Scriblerian, 41, Autumn 2008, 79–81). Sometimes the Broadview Press edition of a well-known novel like Roxana becomes less useful when juxtaposed against other editions, but currently the only readily available version of Roxana is John Mullan’s Oxford World Classic volume of 1996. In keeping with the typical format of a Broadview Press edition , Ms. Mowry’s Roxana includes an Introduction; chronologies of Defoe’s life, work, and times; a text with annotations conveniently placed at the bottom of each page; appendices and a Select Bibliography. In contrast to Norton Critical editions, appendices are confined to contemporary contexts and issues and as a consequence do not include recent articles and selections from books; Ms. Mowry’s Roxana has no less than eight Appendices. Her Introduction consists of a truncated survey of Defoe’s life and a lengthy interpretive guide to the novel. It might, however, have benefited from a more careful vetting. In the Select Bibliography, the only source listed for attribution is the Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe of P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, yet the Introduction cites a title, Reflections on the Late Great Revolution (1689), that is not included in the Furbank and Owens’s volume. The reader would have been better served if Ms. Mowry had focused on the intense recent debate over the attribution of specific works and the difficulty of establishing a definitive canon of De- 69 foe’s writings. The critical introduction to the novel itself is balanced and avoids the melodramatic view that Roxana is a ‘‘damned soul’’ (where Moll Flanders, presumably, is ‘‘saved’’?), concluding instead that she is ‘‘a bright, witty, and resourceful character, capable of profound emotional attachments.’’ Ms. Mowry also suggests that the famous conclusion in which Roxana is tormented by the possibility that her daughter Susan, who had been pursuing her but has now disappeared, might have been murdered—in effect, a conclusion in which nothing is concluded—is much more powerful than an ending in which uncertainties are resolved. One strength of the edition resides in its annotations, some of which provide documentation, but once again a more careful copy editor might have noticed that the texts cited in the annotations are not included in the Select Bibliography. The eight Appendices also deserve careful review since they are accompanied by very little commentary. The use of the phrase ‘‘the Tradition of Whore Biography...