79 adopting the sensual imagery and jettisoning his warnings against sexual excess . In 1685, Dryden used ‘‘humid’’ to describe tongues in his translation of book IV, so the borrowing in Nunnery Amusements might come from there, rather than the Latin. Nunnery Amusements does not simply ‘‘target high literary culture’’ (pace Ms. Benedict); it recycles sexual discourse from earlier erotica and the classics which Dryden made current a century before. What we need now are methods for reading these texts that are sophisticated enough to account for their wild variations . Is it enough to say that Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in Her Smock (v.2) is ‘‘anti-Catholic erotica’’? What does it mean for a seventeenth-century French text to be translated in eighteenth-century London? With the primary materialatour disposal, we can begin to answer such questions more fully. Joseph Pappa State University of New York, Binghamton Life Writings by British Women Writers, 1660–1815, ed. Carolyn Barros and Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Northeastern, 2000. Pp. 418. $50; $22.50 (paper). Ms. Barros and Ms. Smith argue that ‘‘life writing’’is a better term for the writing in this anthology because ‘‘autobiography ’’ is a generic category that represents only one kind. Their feminist perspective informs how they introduce the subjects of their collection as well as how they analyze the ways that women’s lives are interpreted as texts by their readers . For them, ‘‘life writing’’ expands autobiography to encompass ‘‘letters, diaries, travelogues, confessions, pleas, apologies, vindications, and scandalous memoirs.’’ The Introduction, which supports the claim that women’s ‘‘life writing’’ is different from that of men’s because of its internality and domesticity, is lengthy,redundant , and occasionally mired in references to literary theory (‘‘subvert’’ occurs three times in two pages). But the Introduction’s important historical and social background reveals the achievements of women when they were legally at the mercy of fathers, husbands, or a legal and social system biased against them. Though the collection lacks an index, there is a comprehensive Bibliography, and the editors organized entries into categories , such as family histories, conversion narratives, scandalous memoirs, defenses , and travel writing. This diversity ‘‘signals the rich mix of women’s experiences , class and occupational position, and gendered status in Britain between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.’’ For example, in addition to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ann Radcliffe , Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Robinson, there are the more obscure Jane Hoskens, George Anne Bellamy, and Hannah Robertson. Each entry includes a rich introduction to the woman’s life, family history,andthecircumstances surrounding her foray into ‘‘life writing.’’ Ms. Barros and Ms. Smith also provide bibliographical details on the text and its publishing history; each excerpt is about ten pages. This project is successful; it is inclusive, important, and well-researched . Rebecca Shapiro St. Thomas Aquinas College Women and Literary History: ‘‘For There She Was,’’ ed. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood. Newark: Delaware and London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Pp. 247. $48.50. The essays in this volume originate in 80 a Women and Literary History Conference that grew out of the Orlando Project, the latter dedicated to constructing the first large-scale history of British women ’swriting.Theconferenceextendedthe Project’s descriptive and recuperative mandate by considering the grounds for a newly modelled literary history, one that by implicating gender in its explorations of material and social conditions might revive a formerly moribund category —the ‘‘old’’ literary history that seemed by the early 1960s to be both elitist and inadequately theorized—and in the process correct the often naive formulations of 1970s and 1980s feminism. While the individual essays do not provide answers oftheglobalreachindicated by the claim in the collaborativelywritten Introduction that the volume discusses the ‘‘nature, effects, and the possibilities of literature,’’ they cumulatively suggest new and important directions in feminist analysis. Each of the essays concerned with seventeenth - and eighteenth-century subjects (the latter half of the collection focusses on nineteenth-century and early modernist subjects) establishes its claim to innovation by contrast with both traditional literary historical readings and with the ‘‘first-wave’’ feminist responses that questioned their assumptions. As the...
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Sep 1, 2004
Judith P Swazey + 1
