Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire by Melissa Edmundson

Abstract

MLR, .,   prostitutes or, in male fragrances from the s onwards, by those who flaunted their willingness to breach sexual decorum. Patchouli’s olfactory semiotics were elaborate, and Maxwell does an excellent job of explaining the scent’s significance in late Victorian fashion as well as literature. e book commences by explaining how Victorian perfume—soaps, bouquets, nosegays—was strongly gendered, with women encouraged to ‘favour light and floral fragrances’ rather than those containing ‘animalic extracts such as musk and civet’ (p. ). Male scents were initially governed by similar rules, but by the s, department stores stocked a wide range of masculine cosmetics which drew inspiration from India, China, and Japan. Using perfume catalogues, period advertisements , and etiquette books, Maxwell shows how perfume became as complex a Victorian language as flowers themselves. What follows moves seamlessly between accounts of the composition, manufacture, and usage of various perfumes (some now unable to be made because they contain illegal chemicals), their reputation, and their literary and artistic incarnations. Maxwell considers the relationship between perfumes and remembrance, before presenting insightful examinations of Swinburne, Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Lafcadio Hearn, a passionate advocate for Japanese culture who did much to popularize Far Eastern art. Elsewhere, Maxwell deciphers a hidden language of olfactory decadence, showing how homosexual and lesbian writers deployed perfume as an instrument for encoding transgressive desire. A chapter on Field offers exemplary readings of important poems; another on s dandyism is equally persuasive in exploring Wilde’s use of perfume in his self-stylization. e book concludes with responses to perfume in the modernist era, a section notable for a discussion of Compton Mackenzie’s once notorious Sinister Street (). Scents and Sensibility is written with clarity and verve and is mercifully free of jargon. Augmented with attractive colour plates (though lacking ‘scratch and sniff’ panels), it is informative and entertaining, its dandies, poets, and poseurs offering valuable lessons for today’s ‘metrosexuals’ and their ‘grooming products’. L U N F Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, –: Haunted Empire. By M E- . (Palgrave Gothic) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. . x+ pp.£.. ISBN ––––. Melissa Edmundson’s study is an impressive volume that will probably prove in- fluential in the field of Gothic Studies. Across its eighty-year period and several continents, Edmundson demonstrates how women’s colonial Gothic ‘is oen a more sympathetic rendering of the negative consequences of imperialism’ than men’s (pp. –), referring to H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad as canonical points of comparison. She certainly succeeds in her attempt to ‘enrich and complicate the existing parameters of the colonial Gothic beyond the male-authored imperial literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain ’ through careful selection of ‘lesser-known women writers and women whose  Reviews works are not typically read as Gothic’ (p. ). Work on Katherine Mansfield, Mary Kingsley, Susanna Moodie, and Florence Marryat, whose contribution to vampire fiction—e Blood of the Vampire ()—has enjoyed recent critical interest, ensures that Edmundson’s volume will have wide-ranging appeal; simultaneously, Edmundson introduces several overlooked women writers whose literary outputs deserve scholarly scrutiny. Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing is structured geographically, comprising ten case studies that move from Canada to New Zealand via the Caribbean, Africa, India, and Australia. e first pair of chapters consider Canadian Gothic, focusing on Susanna Moodie’s multigeneric memoir and short stories, as well as works by the less familiar Isabella Valancy Crawford. e subsequent chapter, on Florence Marryat, is especially compelling, being informed by Marryat’s broader corpus of work; Edmundson also expertly contextualizes Marryat’s vampiric anti-heroine within Caribbean folklore. Chapters on the essays of Mary Kingsley and the short stories of Margery Lawrence follow, considering African Gothic: West Africa in Kingsley’s case; and, in Lawrence’s, Rhodesia, the East African island of Pemba, and Egypt. e next pair of chapters focus on Anglo-Indian Gothic in the works of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin, on the haunted house motif, and Gothic animals (usually emblematic of India itself, such as tigers or cobras), respectively. Edmundson’s focus next moves to Australasia, with two chapters on Australian Gothic in the works of Mary Fortune (a detective fiction pioneer) and...