Woman Of Letters Research Articles

A New Letter by Sara Coleridge

This article provides a discussion of a previously unpublished letter in the Keats House Collections written by Sara Coleridge, the poet and editor, and the only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Presented here is the first transcription of the letter to be printed – addressed to the artist Samuel Laurence (sometimes Lawrence) – and an analysis of its contents in relation to Sara’s creative writing and life. The essay considers what the letter might be able to tell us about the author, her writing, her engagement with the arts, her position as a woman of letters in the late Romantic/early Victorian period in London, and her health, both physical and mental.

Lost and found in the archives: Hannah Lynch and Dimitrios Vikélas Dublin, Athens, Paris: literary crossings and collaborations

ABSTRACT This essay illuminates a late nineteenth-century literary connection between Ireland and Greece, also revealing hitherto unexplored layers of the vibrant fin-de-siècle salon cultures in Paris and related literary and artistic networks. As a transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration, the essay maps a process of archival discovery in the National Library of Greece, Athens: a significant cache of letters from Hannah Lynch, Irish New Woman, Ladies’ Land League activist, author of a truly international and diverse body of travel writing, cultural commentary and fiction, to Dimitrios Vikélas, iconic figure of nineteenth-century Greece. The discovery of Lynch’s significant textual and photographic presence in the archive amassed by Vikélas, man of letters and scholar, translator, novelist, philanthropist and founding President of the International Olympic Committee, is significant for several reasons: Lynch’s correspondence reveals further details that flesh out the biography of this marginalised writer; the letters also offer insights into the struggles of a “woman of letters” in the late nineteenth-century literary and publishing landscape, documenting where articles are published and sometimes the remuneration; finally, letters in the Vikélas archive from Lynch and those who were part of their shared Paris-centred intellectual networks foreground patronage, collaboration, friendship and underpinning salon culture.

Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America by Bonny H. Miller

Reviewed by: Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America by Bonny H. Miller Elissa Stroman Augusta Browne: Composer and Woman of Letters in Nineteenth-Century America. By Bonny H. Miller. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020. [xiii, 457 p. ISBN 9781580469722 (hardcover), $135; ISBN 9781787448834 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index, works list. "Augusta Browne's outsider status and self-agency," author Bonny H. Miller explains in the introduction, "offer a potent narrative that transcends antebellum and Victorian-era norms in America. She constructed a substantial legacy in American music and journalism through talent, craft, persistence, outreach, and nineteenth-century equivalents of modern marketing strategies" (p. 1). Indeed, upon reading Miller's biography, one might call Augusta Browne (1820–1882) a nineteenth-century "multihyphenate," to invoke an au courant term. Browne taught, performed, composed, and wrote, melding all of those activities into a career spanning over fifty years. This impressive biography asks us to question what is canonic music (or who is a canonic composer), what makes a woman's work feminist, and the ways in which society and family impact one's career trajectory. Miller's remarkable tome, amassing over two decades of research, is a deep dive into the life history of Browne, piecing together her story from extant primary sources: government records, newly scanned periodicals and newspapers, scant correspondence scattered across many archives, and surviving sheet music. In the first nine chapters, Miller traces Browne's life year by year in meticulous detail, recreating the entire musical society in which Browne worked. Throughout her life, family obligations required frequent moves, including stints in Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Despite the seeming instability, Browne made her concert debut at age six and was a published composer as a teenager. Miller shows how at all times Browne was an entrepreneur, finding work wherever she could and marketing her writing, sheet music, teaching, and performing (as a church organist). Each chapter spans typically between five and ten years of her life and is delineated by major activities or milestones: her family origins, the start of [End Page 404] her father's music academy in Boston, her early compositions in Philadelphia, being a music teacher in New York, her literary debut, marriage, the Civil War and family struggles, and moving to Washington, D.C. This chronological structure allows readers to see how Browne was a woman of her age who grappled with major issues and ideologies of the nineteenth century. One of the overarching themes of the book is the impact Browne's family had on her career trajectory, especially considering the immense losses she faced. Early on, Miller calls Browne's childhood a "traumatic odyssey" (p. 40), but that was before we learned she was the third of nine siblings, seven of whom she outlived. Writing was a cathartic outlet for Browne, producing, for example, a tribute to her brother, Hamilton, the Young Artist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1852), which Miller situates in nineteenth-century condolence literature. Further, after only three years of marriage (and having married later in life, at age thirty-five), Browne suddenly lost her husband. As a new widow, she published a popular devotional work; Browne's faith was an outlet that sustained her throughout her life's tragedies and offers another common thread in this biography. Miller admits that while Browne's "story emerges as both old fashioned and strikingly modern" (p. 1), she also was definitively a woman of her time. Though we may wish to see her as a boundary-breaking feminist, "that is not the primary narrative of her life that has emerged from the abundance of her recently digitized prose" (p. xii). Miller argues Browne worked from within the expected spaces of her age. Browne had to tread carefully, navigating expectations for female decorum and avoiding implications of impropriety while also being a successful working musician, composer, and writer. "Gender was the elephant in the room" (p. 101), and throughout the book Miller effectively addresses gender issues. Of note is the discussion regarding the opportunities (or lack thereof) available to Browne as an unmarried...

Quelque membre de notre cercle by Danielle Mémoire

Reviewed by: Quelque membre de notre cercle by Danielle Mémoire Warren Motte Mémoire, Danielle. Quelque membre de notre cercle. P.O.L, 2021. ISBN 978-2-8180-5234-1. Pp. 201. The most striking feature of Mémoire’s book is its formal organization. A rhopalic structure is involved here: the text is shaped a bit like a snowball, whose mass increases, then slowly melts. There are seventy-two chapters. The first chapter contains one paragraph, the second contains two, and so forth, until the middle of the book, at which point the chapters begin to decrease until the final one, which once again contains a sole paragraph. The volume’s publisher mentions that Mémoire was inspired by Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (1980)—and indeed the final chapter of Mémoire’s book is composed of a quotation from Hejinian’s book. A life is involved here, too, as a female narrator closely resembling Mémoire herself looks back over the seventy-two years of her life, noting some salient events or impressions from each of those years, in turn. If I hedge a bit on the question of the narrator’s identity, it is because the speaking subject in this text is extremely elusive: “[P]arler de moi (par écrit) ne me plaît pas,” she confesses (164), and that reticence expresses itself in a variety of ways throughout the book. The narrative style is discursive in character, and fragmentary. Like in her other books, Mémoire expresses herself here in a very polished, almost hieratic French. Fully cognizant of that stylistic tendency, she shies away from commenting upon it: “Quant à la très particulière et inintéressante nature de mon combat avec la langue, ce qu’il faudrait, c’est n’en rien dire” (182). Certain themes recur insistently here, as Mémoire exploits the rhetorical power of repetition to her advantage. Some of those themes seem more banal than others—clothing and fashion for instance. Yet even there, Mémoire’s point is more serious than it might appear, involving issues of the presentation of the self. Other themes are more immediately recognizable as weighty ones. Mémoire reflects on the notion of shame on several occasions, both the shame we may feel for ourselves, and the shame we may feel for others. Along the way, she asks a series of intriguing questions, many of which involve literature and its conditions of possibility, its ontology. How can a writer negotiate the gap that yawns between words and things? What is the difference between lying and fiction? What is the status of the lie within a fictional world? How can one usefully compare the ways that real people (Proust, for example) and characters (Marcel) exist? What is the difference between a man of letters and a writer? What does it mean to be a woman of letters? How much attention may one legitimately accord to oneself in asking questions such as those? Whatever hesitation she may feel in that latter regard, this book puts on display a more carefully considered and detailed portrait of the artist than any of Mémoire’s previous works. In its subtle geometries, its intelligence, and its canniness, it invites us to think about a life and a lifework, simultaneously. [End Page 250] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Victorian Women Poets

Victorian Women Poets Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) A. Mary F. Robinson was best known, to her English audience, for her poetry and, to her French audience, as a woman of letters. So begins the introduction to Robinson's "Anglo-French" life in Patricia Rigg's A. Mary F. Robinson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2021). Rigg seeks to reconcile these dual identities in this comprehensive and engaging biographical study. Rigg's book offers a nuanced look at an international poet: the unorthodoxy of Robinson's life, the integration of various literary styles (poetics, historical, biographical), and her Anglo-French identity. Highlighting Anglo-French literary communities and the social components of Robinson's life, Rigg's biography sets the tone for this year's scholarship on Victorian women poets. Its rich, layered approach—bringing together extensive archival material with personal and familial relationships (Rigg details her time in the Robinson family home and her relationship with Robinson's great-granddaughter by marriage)—offers a methodology that foregrounds materiality, affect, and form. Similarly, James Diedrick's edited edition for the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Series, Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, U.K.: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2021) foregrounds Blind's contributions as a transnational and displaced (or expatriate) writer. His scholarly edition of Blind's late poetry brings three volumes (published between 1889 and 1895) together, alongside selections of her reviews and literary essays, to foreground Blind's experimental verse forms and affiliations with leading Decadent communities. The scholarship, then, of 2021 predominantly interrogates an intersectional approach to Victorian women poets: from exploring the ecological impact of Decadent poets to the intersections of poetry with a wide range of nineteenth-century sciences, transnational and cosmopolitan outlooks, and various modes of being. In this way, Victorian poetry becomes a site of curiosity, exchange, and engagement—in all senses of the word—with the world. In "Haptic Ekphrasis" (Victorian Studies 64, no. 1 [2021]: 88–114), Jill R. Ehnenn reconsiders the ekphrastic text, usually defined as a technology of vision: the relationship between word and image. In the Victorian period—and more broadly—ekphrasis involves not only vision but a technology of feeling, "both touch and emotion" (p. 89). In what Ehnenn calls "haptic ekphrasis," she identifies the centrality of affect and the sensing body as a method of [End Page 418] phenomenological interpretation and poetic encounter, or poetry's ability to do something, to move our bodies and brains into reconsiderations of the self/ object within the world (in both the nineteenth century and our world today). She makes three central claims. Focusing on haptics alongside vision enables reconsiderations of poetic form that foreground the "visceral register of experience" (p. 92). New ways of analyzing poetry emerge when we consider the tactility of the ekphrastic text or the arousal of emotion when we are attuned to meter and metrical variance. Rather than viewing ekphrasis as a description of an art object, haptic ekphrasis documents the poet's encounter with the art object. When reading poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850) or Julia Margaret Cameron's "On a Portrait" (1876), with priority given to haptics, formal readings encourage sympathy for the object and what it represents. The language of sympathy here foregrounds another of Ehnenn's claims: that haptic ekphrasis resonates with the nineteenth-century discursive shift from sympathy to empathy (Einfühlung). Most intriguingly, perhaps, Ehnenn identifies haptic ekphrasis as a strategic technique for "minoritarian" (women and queer) writers (p. 100). Through insightful close readings of poetry by John Gray, Olive Custance, Julia Margaret Cameron, Graham R. Tomson, and the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu, Ehnenn showcases how haptic readings communicate the complexities of lived experiences as a woman or queer poet. Not only, then, does haptic ekphrasis permit realistic detail and transportation of feeling, but "ekphrasis built on the haptic . . . permits the author to safely articulate the ineffable, the non-canonical, and the private" (p. 105). In providing a new framework from which to understand ekphrasis, Ehnenn points toward the phenomenological and epistemological potentials of poetic experience and poetic encounter—for both the Victorians and the twenty-first-century reader. Sight and...

L’‘Histoire de ma littérature’ de Mme d’Arconville (1720‐1805): Ecriture de soi et généalogie d’une personnalité intellectuelle

AbstractMme d’Arconville stands out amongst eighteenth‐century women of letters because she combined the practice of literature with the more unexpected study of science. When at the end of a very long life she returns to what she calls the ‘story of her head’, the anecdotes she recounts constitute a genealogy of her thought stemming from her childhood’s encyclopaedic curiosity. This essay examines this intellectual narrative through two unpublished autobiographical manuscripts written around 1803: the ‘Histoire de ma littérature’ and ‘Mes souvenirs’. These are less concerned with rooting identity in an intimate sense of self than with investigating the genealogy of what would later be called an intellectual personality. Her autobiographical writing thus invites us to rediscover a world both within and outside the self and makes it not only possible to retrace the intellectual history of a woman, but also to apprehend experiences from the period’s vast networks of sociability.

Teresa de Cartagena’s Illness and Disability as Embodied Knowledge

AbstractPhysical illness may lead women to grow spiritually, reflect on their lives, and learn how to write about their unique experiences. A fifteenth-century Castilian writer, Teresa de Cartagena distinguishes herself for being a nun, a conversa, a member of a powerful Jewish family, and most of all a disabled (deaf) woman of letters. Her work Arboleda de los enfermos represents a hybrid paradigm in which literature, religion, and medicine interact with one another in medieval Europe. Teresa’s use of embodied metaphors to describe her experience of isolation and loneliness helps reorient readers’ understanding of the disability narrative. Suffering itself serves as an embodiment of consolation and as a medical and religious treatment that relieves her suffering. This article argues that to objectively examine her illness and disability, Teresa deploys intersectional knowledge to interpret her experience, and to empower herself and those who are suffering from the same condition, asserting that deafness, like any other physical impairment, is not a social or religious punishment but rather a “privileged” condition.

Les passeurs et passeuses littéraires dans le discours identitaire en Pologne des Lumières

AbstractThere are three ways of conceptualising the identity of men and women involved in the circulation of literary forms and foreign texts developed in Poland during the Enlightenment era: firstly, the identity of men and women of letters as members of the privileged social classes; secondly, their identity as members of a cosmopolitan community; thirdly, their involvement in the emerging idea of nationhood. This article explores the relationship between these three aspects, particularly focusing on the ways in which notions of identity are expressed in texts which explicitly discuss the question of cultural transfer.

Carlyle’s “Phallus-worship”: An Annotated Transcription

Abstract In this hitherto unpublished manuscript essay (c. 1848), Thomas Carlyle uses ancient Dionysian ritual as a symbol for a complex of contemporaneous social tendencies that he deplores. Foremost among these tendencies is the displacement of piety and duty by the exaltation of sensualism and romantic love, which Carlyle associates with revolutionary France, George Sand and her epigones, and circulating-library fiction more generally. “Phallus-worship” represents a jointure between Carlyle’s humane youthful writings and the authoritarian jeremiads of his old age, combining the literary virtuosity of the former with the caustic perspective of the latter. More broadly, “Phallus-worship” is a textual locus of the shift between early and mid-Victorian sensibilities, as Carlyle’s own residual puritanism marked the limits of his capacity to engage with the literary and cultural developments that interested a rising generation of Victorian men and women of letters.

Postface

Postface

James Diedrick, Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters

James Diedrick, <i>Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters</i>

Things Woolfian

Things Woolfian Kat Meads (bio) Attics often give shelter to what shouldn't be preserved. Rediscovered in a crinkly, yellowed state, my dreadful 1973 term paper written for Professor Frank Ryan's honors class on the "search for unity" in Virginia Woolf's novels, nephew Quentin Bell's then-new biography my only secondary source. Throughout the thirty-two pages, Professor Ryan diligently circled my (numerous) typos: Click for larger view View full resolution —but gave up correcting the error of my block paragraph quotation marks early in the game, likely worn out by the task. On the title page, in slanting blue script, he posed these questions: Do you imply that V.W. found unity in death? Was she "ripe" and "ready for death" in a Nietzschean sense? Any relationship between V.W's art, her life and death, and Freud's Thanatos as dominant over Eros in 1930s? Did V.W. feel that England was dying in 1930s? Although I accumulated points for "handling the themes" of "male/female dichotomy," "art and its limitations," "love and its limitations," "madness," and "death," Professor Ryan signed off with another question: Could more have been done with silence?—a question time has plumped with irony. Why can't we Woolfians stop gabbing about Virginia? As early as 1974, in her essay collection Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick already bemoaned Bloomsbury rehash: "The period, the letters, the houses, [End Page 135] the love affairs, the blood lines: These are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again." Should the reading public need reminding in 1978, that banner year for Woolf studies and publications, John Hillaby announced in a New Scientist article that "the Woolf hunt" was "still under way." In a 2015 review of Viviane Forrester's Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, reviewer Suzanne Berne used up some of her own word count to re-ask: "To the hundreds of books that have been written about Virginia Woolf, why [Berne's italics] add another? More to the point, why aren't her own books enough?" Worthy questions, both. Also questions that ignore the attractions of spectating a turf war composed of interpretive skirmishes, internecine bickerings, and revelations regarding who aligns with which side and why. As Jacqueline Rose reminded in her review of Hermione Lee's 1996 biography of Virginia Woolf, closest rival—in terms of influence—to Quentin Bell's 1972 account: "It is always worth asking of any biography, with whom in the story, if anyone, does the biographer identify?" ________ Thus far no Virginia Woolf biographer has identified with Sir Leslie Stephen—writer, scholar, expert mountaineer, Shreckhorn first-ascenter, Dictionary of National Biography editor. What's intriguing, from the biographical standpoint, is the similarity of his portrayal in books, essays, and criticism devoted to his daughter. About Sir Leslie's personality there seems to be neither undue argument nor abundant sympathy. A prickly, whiny, sulky man, often overwrought and constantly overly demanding of his family's attentions and concern. A patriarch soaked in self-pity, the perpetually weeping widower. A stepfather who deeply resented Stella Duckworth's leaving his household for marriage and a household of her own. A breadwinner "with an irrational fear of ending his days in the poorhouse," his operational standard a "melodramatic tyranny" (Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf). A fellow who excelled at enacting a "Victorian widower's hysterical helplessness" (Janet Malcolm, "A House of One's Own"). In penning the Mausoleum Book—"purportedly a letter to his children to memorialize their dead mother," scoffed reviewer Virginia Hyman—Sir Leslie, once again, managed to make it all about Sir Leslie. After pledging "simply to write about your mother," the memoirist amends: "In order to speak intelligibly it will be best to begin by saying something about myself." During his lifetime, Sir Leslie was obeyed—but not without resentment. After his death, Vanessa "dreamt on more than one occasion that she had murdered him," reports Frances Spalding (Vanessa Bell). Short of murdering him, Vanessa appears not to have expressed undue sorrow when she, Thoby, Adrian, and Virginia were freed of his rule and presence...

Tracing the “Political” in Women’s Work: Women of Letters in the Greek Cultural Space, 1800–1832

Tracing the “Political” in Women’s Work: Women of Letters in the Greek Cultural Space, 1800–1832

Review

Review

Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere 1750–1850 ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer, Lauren Nossett

 Reviews it as a second-rate exercise for his talents. Indeed, when, amazingly, in August  d’Annunzio finally managed to send a dra of his article to Olschki, he half apologized for the long delay, implying the impossibility for him (or anyone) of compressing into a small compass anything new concerning the grandeur of Dante. More immediately, however, creditors had formed noisy queues outside the gates of his baronial mansion, the Capponcina, where auction sales of his goods, including all furnishings and ornaments, were organized for the beginning of  June. Melosi shows how preoccupied the nervous Passerini became in his analysis of the mood in Florence, where, he reported to d’Annunzio, bets were being laid on whether or not he would accept the contract. Disdain and discomfort forced d’Annunzio to take refuge in flight using the temporary pseudonym of Gerard d’Argan. He continued on to Genoa and then to Paris, where he stayed for six months on the fourth floor of the Meurice, in Rue de Rivoli (fellow guests in the hotel were Guglielmo Marconi and the Italian Ambassador Tittoni). In secrecy, and under another assumed name, Guy d’Arbes, d’Annunzio le Paris for Arcachon. U  O J W Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere –. Ed. by E K and L N. Rochester, NY: Camden House. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. In this varied and accessible collection of essays, conventional period boundaries are subordinated to the steady rise of women writers and readers to become signi- ficant factors in German-language literature for the first time. While not ignoring canonical literary movements or the persistent opposition to women’s authorship during these years, its contributors concentrate on exploring and celebrating the roles—both historical and imagined—that women of letters were able to create for themselves and the networks in which they participated. A good balance is struck between well-known figures (Sophie von La Roche, Karoline von Günderrode) and investigation of largely forgotten authors; the fascinating Polyxene Büsching, for instance, whose brief stint as literary confidante of Catherine the Great is analysed by Ruth P. Dawson, together with her letters to fellow poet Johanna Charlotte Unzer as a female community of practice (pp. –). Variety as a characteristic of the collection also applies to its methodological approaches and the appeal its essays will have for readers. Some will be particularly useful as teaching resources as they provide introductions to the history of reading, women’s education, and the overall social and political context as well as to the author in question (for example, the two opening articles by Monika Nenon and Lauren Nossett on La Roche). Others are more speculative and aimed at a more specialist audience in their detailed focus on individual texts or re- MLR, .,   search paradigms. Angela Sanmann contributes a stimulating discussion of the anonymous  French translation of La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, attributed to Marie-Elisabeth de La Fite, herself an author of moral tales for children (pp. –). Sanmann reflects on what the alterations and additions tell us about La Fite’s progressive views of womanhood and her understanding of her dual role as writer and translator; she also reconsiders the relationship between this first French translation and Joseph Collyer’s  English version. Further examples of more specialist essays include Amy Jones’s comparative analysis of vampirism as a metaphor for authorship in the writings of Günderrode and Clemens von Brentano. Jones inspires with a persuasive combination of Motivgeschichte and close readings, made all the more valuable as she decisively breaks with autobiographical readings of Günderrode’s poetry (pp. –). Also inspiring is Sara Luly’s essay on ‘Ghostwriters’ (pp. –), which for the first time brings together texts by Benedikte Naubert and Sophie Albrecht to consider how their spectral protagonists represent not only the dilemmas faced by women writers of the day (self-censorship!), but also possible solutions (self-Othering). In an important addition to the volume’s predominant focus on individual writers and/or works, Julie L. J. Koehler examines uses of the ‘Märchenoma’ tradition as a strategy for legitimizing women’s claims to literary authorship...

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico

Cara Anne Kinnally's Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts builds on the premises of Benedict Anderson's seductive nation as imagined community paradigm and constructively destabilizes them. She examines the literature of “Greater Mexico,” conceived as a capacious “contact zone” riddled with ethnic and class tensions and warped by the presence of a contentious border and the disproportionate weight of the United States. She explores how some elite Mexicanos imaginatively reconstructed this space and their place within it. They took up their pens, not to forge a nation but to envision a relationship between the United States and Mexico that was founded not on antagonism, usurpation, oppression, and hopeless asymmetry but on cooperation and common interests. Others, having remained on the other side of the painful line drawn in 1848, laid claim in writing to being white, civilized, and modern enough to be welcomed as valuable US citizens.Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts uncovers visions of Greater Mexico that are both surprising and revealing: bolstered by shared beliefs about racial and cultural hierarchies, patriots and would-be mediators called not for resistance but for harmony paired with the preservation of distinctiveness, for assimilation and annexation. Lorenzo de Zavala advocated for the “fortunate conquest of civilization” through the spread of US influence on its backward, volatile neighbor (p. 57). In 1848, as Yucatán was devastated by a violent Maya rebellion, Justo Sierra O'Reilly lobbied for annexation. The melodramatic novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Eusebio Chacón—the former's written in English, the latter's in Spanish—were authored by self-conscious natives of Mexico's “lost territories” and drip with adventure, romance, and poetic justice. Their dignified Mexican protagonists are ethnically and ethically superior and stand in stark contrast to the uncivilized, racialized others—decadent Spaniards, wild Indians—and the Anglo hypocrites who play the novels' villains.Kinnally's intelligent reading of the diverse artifacts contrived by these Mexicanos—a travelogue, diaries, correspondence, and novels as well as, tangentially but with fascinating implications, public monuments—captures, as she well points out, the messiness of a nineteenth century of unstable boundaries and shifting allegiances, marked by violence, economic and social transformations, and political experimentation. She is also right to stress that their visions of Mexican and Anglo harmony, “intercultural negotiation, and hemispheric solidarity” were premised on “problematic concepts of culture, class, race, and belonging that actually excluded large segments of America” and were not the exclusive patrimony of the imperialist, hegemonic republic and its oppressive majorities (pp. 160, 126). Nonetheless, her ingenious if flawed artificers remain trapped, not in teleological narratives but in our assumptions about what drove Latin America's men and women of letters in the century that followed independence.Thinking of Latin American novelists as monomaniacally obsessed with plotting the nation can crowd out their other—perhaps more important—motivations: artistic aspiration, wanting to tell a good story or to sell books, wanting to legitimize, convince, intimidate, antagonize, mobilize. Identities—multiple and overlapping, in both literary and political discourse—were strategically constructed and displayed. They could rarely be contained by the modern, monolithic, all-absorbing nation. Kinnally's thoughtful analysis offers us a glimpse of these tensions and diverse aspirations, but they unfortunately often remain on the sidelines. This is perhaps especially true of the politicians she surveys through a single literary product. Thus, in his exile narrative, Lorenzo de Zavala calls for bolstering Mexico's democratic institutions and economic development through US influence, activated by settlers from the North. When in 1836 the “enterprising guests” who had settled in Texas broke off with his patria, he joined theirs as the Lone Star republic's first vice president and perhaps its most successful Mexican immigrant (p. 60). Two generations later, in doing what she thought was her patriotic duty, his granddaughter fought to preserve Texas's Hispanic and Catholic cultural legacy.Similarly, in the midst of popular rebellion, the nation—whether he conceived it as Mexico or Yucatán—was not foremost on Justo Sierra O'Reilly's mind. His willingness to hand over Yucatán's sovereignty—to the United States in the first instance, but to some other great power if that failed—stemmed less from a sense of shared white republican identity than from desperation. The visions sketched in the novels considered are less calculated but equally complex. If Chacón hoped to contribute to New Mexico's enlightenment and integration through his “entertaining literature,” Ruiz de Burton—twice an outsider, as a woman and a Californian—seemed more intent, in her efforts to reveal “qué gran humbug es esta Yankie nation,” on tearing down a nation than on building one up (pp. 97, 132). Kinnally does us a great service in dismantling a static Mexicano identity, inevitably rooted in antagonism and resistance. By further excavating the “forgotten futures” that she has brought to light, we will surely uncover some unexpected, stimulating pasts.

Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England.

Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in Early Modern England.

George Eliot and Print Media: Woman of Letters

It is helpful to understand George Eliot as a ‘woman of letters’ whose literary work extends beyond the novel, even fiction. The considerable variety of formats and range of genres of which Marian Evans/George Eliot availed herself between 1840 and 1880 are directly related to the coincidence of her lifespan with the efflorescence of the press. This article examines the trajectory of her career through three networks of print production: that of the Brays in Coventry, including Charles Bray and his newspaper in which Marian Evans published early work, and his family, Cara Bray and Sara Hennell with whom she made close emotional and literary bonds; that of John Chapman and his publishing and periodical circles in London, where she was afforded a unique opportunity to edit in its office one of the famous quarterlies of the day, the Westminster Review, and to read, meet and edit its contributors and their work; and lastly, the network of George Henry Lewes, her partner in life and work, whose range of journalism and publications — including fiction, drama, science, and criticism of German literature offered her access to reliable advice, wide experience, and contacts with editors, publishers, and authors across the literary spectrum.

Entre la voz y el silencio: autoridad femenina en La Sigea de Carolina Coronado

In the novel La Sigea (1854) Carolina Coronado portrays a 16th-century humanist, Luisa Sigea de Velasco, revendicating her criticism of the situation of the creative woman. In this work, Coronado illustrates both the Renaissance reality of the scholarly courtesan, and her own nineteenth-century author-identity, by sharing the disappointment and frustration they suffered as women of letters in contexts of male hegemony. In the following pages we investigate the vindication of female authorship as a creative authority.

Correspondance de la Grande Guerre à Folco de Baroncelli. Tome I (1914-1915):Sauver le grand homme, réhabiliter l'image de la petite patrie by Jeanne de Flandreysy

Reviewed by: Correspondance de la Grande Guerre à Folco de Baroncelli. Tome I (1914-1915):Sauver le grand homme, réhabiliter l'image de la petite patrie by Jeanne de Flandreysy Callan Roten Flandreysy, Jeanne de. Correspondance de la Grande Guerre à Folco de Baroncelli. Tome I (1914-1915):Sauver le grand homme, réhabiliter l'image de la petite patrie. Ed. Colette H. Winn and Colette Trout. Classiques Garnier, 2018. Pp. 870. ISBN 978-2-406-07217-1. 105€ (cloth). 67€ (paper). World War I ushered in a period of great despair, trauma, and imbalance across Europe. Of all of the hardships faced during the war and the post-war period, a large focus has been placed on the sacrifices and contributions made by men. Modern feminist scholarship has aimed to bring equal attention to the multitude of sacrifices and contributions made by women during the Great War. Jeanne de Flandreysy, though she is still little-known by the French public, is an excellent example of a woman who served her country in the war in the best way that she could—through writing. Like many other women during the war, Jeanne de Flandreysy wrote a substantial number of letters. However, many of the letters written by women during this time are almost impossible to find. Jeanne de [End Page 153] Flandreysy's 998 letters to Folco de Baroncelli during the Great War period are currently being conserved in Avignon at the Palais du Roure, but until now have never been included in a critical edition or published collection. Colette H. Winn and Colette Trout's critical edition embarks on the daunting task of providing a detailed chronicle of Jeanne de Flandreysy's epistolary corpus enriched with a thorough introduction, annotations, and appendix that solidifies the importance of her letters. In this first volume, the editors chose to focus on the letters from the years 1914-1915. They argue that these letters shed light on the essential role that Jeanne played in Folco de Baroncelli's future as a poet and also provide a personal account of the lived experience for both French men and women during the war. Winn and Trout also argue that Flandreysy's friendship with Folco highlights the important (and often ignored) role that women played during the war. Women were the "war's audience"—they encouraged soldiers, listened to them, and mourned with them. Through her letters to Folco while he was stationed in Toul, Jeanne was able to successfully fulfill this role. In her letters, Jeanne feeds Folco's desire for knowledge, detailing the effects of war on daily life, her fears, and the ever-growing number of casualties. The introduction and the abundance of notes in this critical edition provide an extensive overview of Flandreysy's life and her relationship with Folco, while solidifying her importance as a woman of letters. Winn and Trout's introduction carefully examines the multiple functions of epistolary writing. Through a deep analysis of the letters, the editors are successfully able to establish how Flandreysy's correspondence exemplifies each of these functions. Calling upon other scholars, the editors also effectively highlight the importance of the female experience, particularly through writing, during the Great War. Although the volume does not contain Folco's correspondence to Jeanne, his voice is always present in her letters, calling attention to the powerful style of Flandreysy's writing. This remarkable critical edition brings an outstanding and lesser known figure out of the shadows while allowing us to understand the greater importance of epistolary writing and of the female war experience. Callan Roten University of Maryland, College Park Copyright © 2020 Women in French Studies