Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock , and: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 323 mode. Robertson rightly insists on the deliberateness with which the constructive involvement of the reader is required by the "strategies of uncertainty and disruption" (p. 70) that Scott shares with such predecessors as Walpole and Radcliffe. The third chapter is devoted to Scott's use of the frame narrative both in the playful introductory sections of his first editions and in the authorial repossession of his texts constituted by the final magnum opus edition of the Waverley novels. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 bring out the special strengths of Robertson's approach: her examination not only of neglected texts such as The Pirate and Peveril ofthe Peak, but of such familiar works as The Antiquary, The Heart ofMidlothian, and Redgauntlet, shows how richly productive a reading of Scott can be when full account is taken of his sophisticated and self-conscious deployment of the full repertoire of Gothic narrative strategies. Robertson argues convincingly that we must resist the kind of over-simplified and essentially reductive reading of Scott's texts that posits a recuperative model in which hero and reader alike share in an educational journey out of the Gothic world of romance and into the realm of "real" history: in Redgauntlet as in other of Scott's novels, "Gothic is increasingly validated as one of the ways in which a modern imagination like Darsie 's, or Scott's, or the early nineteenth-century reader's, can best perceive and represent the past and the experience of being persecuted by it" (p. 264). Jane Millgate University of Toronto Eliza Fenwick. Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock. Isobel Grundy, ed. Peterborough , Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994. 359pp. US$12.95. ISBN 1-55111-014-8. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, eds. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994. 371pp. US$9.95. ISBN 1-55111-038-5. These two books represent substantial additions to the list of possible texts for teachers of the novel or women's studies. Eliza Fenwick's Secresy, hitherto unavailable, gives us both an accomplished epistolary novel and a riveting tale. Shelley's Frankenstein is widely available and much taught; but by choosing the 1818 edition as copy text and placing it in an unusually broad cultural context, the editors have justified the publication ofyet another edition, and offered us an attractive alternative. Broadview Press's format is inviting—clearly printed on good paper, with distinctive nineteenth-century photographs on the covers, the books provide the physical pleasure that is so often a component of enticing one to pick up a book in the first place. Secresy provides much matter for reflection and discussion, and Isobel Grundy's introduction serves as a good starting place. She makes excellent use of the small amount of available biographical material, and in doing so, draws attention to the difficulties inherent in retrieving from the past a writer whose work has been largely forgotten. Fenwick was a friend of some of the foremost writers and thinkers of her day and she was closely connected to and influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays. Yet the opening paragraphs of the introduction are filled with uncertainties : we know her date and place of death, but Grundy can only say about her birth that "It seems she was born in Cornwall on 1 February 1766," and she must be even more vague about the date of her marriage to John Fenwick ("about 1788"). About her education, and how she met her husband, "nobody knows" (p. 7). 324 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 In the face of all this uncertainty, the accomplishment of the novel stands out all the more clearly; it is, as Grundy says, impossible to label, but a consideration of the many genres that it combines so effectively—"epistolary, gothic, sentimental, radical, novel of manners, or novel of social conscience" (p. 30)—would lead to much fruitful discussion. Fenwick handles her large cast of characters adeptly, drawing us into the troubles of Murden, Sibella, and Caroline, and the lies and betrayals of Montgomery with equal interest. The Gothic is genuinely present, physically by the ruin of the title, and in certain fearsome...