Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture, by Jennifer Esmail (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013, 296 pp., cloth, $59.95, ISBN: 978-0-8214-2034-8)Reading Victorian Deafness opens with immortalization in a painting of Queen Victoria's willingness and ability to fingerspell with a deaf woman, Elizabeth Tuffield, by a deaf painter, William Agnew. Victoria's actions were contradictory to spirit of her age in terms of comfort with sign languages and deafness and focus on Hmiting definition of language via unrelenting rise of oralism. While this book does trace and revisit historical and Hnguistic trajectory of events leading to imposition of oralism on deaf people during this time, value of Esmail's book is her focus on deaf subjectivity: In addition to closely examining Victorian understandings of signed languages, this book focuses on two related topics: Victorian cultural constructions of deafness and Hved and self-representations of deaf (4). Her expHcation of deaf people and their work and writings within context of Victorian process of mis-understanding language as speech shows that deaf people actively tried to question and undermine this cultural process.Esmail's first chapter on deaf and politics of language disentangles and then re-entangles issues that arise in intersections between deafness, sound, and poetry (31). Esmail analyzes how deaf poets defended their in as imagined, silent, and textual-not auditory-constructions of print. Esmail analyzes specifically how deaf poets such as Amos Draper and John Kitto at this time show, in addition to celebration of visual properties and bodily signs within poems themselves, how patterns of rhythm and rhyme were therefore moored in textual practices rather than sound experiences (30) or speech. Esmail analyzes how the perceived gap between deafness and poetic ability was exploited by deaf people, and their allies, in their fight to defend sign language use (23).The issue faced by nineteenth-century deaf poets was then a particular physical disability but rather cultural prejudices about relationship between disability and poetry (26).In her second chapter, Esmail underscores rarity of signing deaf characters in world of Victorian fiction even as there are numerous examples of deafened, not signing, people in this genre.This chapter posits that absence of deafness in Victorian fiction reveals its investment in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality: one that understands fiction as a record of what was said and (70) via problematic silent heroines. Esmail points out how deafness is not as much of a problem for Victorians as lack of speech and assumption that writing is a form of printed orality (73). For silent Victorian woman to be acceptable, she had to have access to oral voice; one thing I would have liked to see Esmail do is indicate that this tradition goes at least as far back as early modern period in this era's dependence on speech along with anxieties about being heard and not hearing wrong thing. These anxieties did not just pop up suddenly in Victorian era as she seems to indicate.1 Writers like Dickens and Collins show difficulties of representing deaf characters in fiction via connecting corporeality to textuality and, more specifically, granting hands, arms, and face linguistic complexity of vocal organs, tongue, and lips within strictures of a written English text (71). Esmail also does neglect somewhat a more complete analysis of Victorian fiction genre in relation to silence, but possibly does so in order to focus on deaf viewpoint and subjectivity within works. She argues that Dickens and Collins portray Sophy and Madonna, deaf women in their works, as having more agency than has often been acknowledged; she also illustrates how Dickens and Collins attempt to incorporate inaudible voices (100) and in so doing subtly point out some of failures of assumed oral nature of print. …