Women and Literary History: "For There She Was" (review)

Reviewed by: Women and Literary History: “For There She Was.” Barbara K. Seeber (bio) Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, eds. Women and Literary History: “For There She Was.” Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003. 238pp. US$48.50. ISBN 0-87413-824-8. Women and Literary History, edited by Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, brings together the voices of distinguished international scholars on a wide variety of primary texts, ranging from the seventeenth-century Midwives Book to nineteenth-century anti-slavery and science writing to the poetry of Pauline Johnson. This collection has its roots in the Orlando Project's "Women and Literary History Conference" held at the University of Alberta in 1997, and its overall aim is to reassess existing paradigms of literary history and suggest possible alternatives and future directions. A number of the essays are united in their critique of a separatist literary history. Elaine Hobby states that "the project for feminist literary historians ... is not the recovery of a female tradition, but the rewriting of a male-only literary history so as to give proper place to both men's and women's works" (38–39); Jane Sharp's midwifery manual, for example, needs to placed in the context of male-authored tradition so that her "range and detail ... can be appreciated" (38). Similarly, Kathryn R. King argues that the paradigm of women writers in opposition to male writers "restrict[s] the register of tones we are prepared to hear in women's texts" and "remove[s]" them "from their own historical contexts" (44). Instead, she adapts Mary Louise Pratt's model of the "contact zone" and, focusing on Abraham Cowley's influence on Jane Barker and Aphra Behn, shows how they "found in the poetic self-fashionings of this male poet a language for expressing their own disappointments and aggrieved sense of cultural alienation" (52). Betty A. Schellenberg demonstrates that, in terms of eighteenth-century literature, models of gender dichotomy privilege writers of the early and late century at the expense of mid-eighteenth-century writers such as Charlotte Lennox and Sarah Fielding, and suggests that "gender must be weighed in the balance with social status, geographical location, and connections to the publishing world as conditions determining professional activity and reception" (87). Jo-Ann Wallace's essay on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers Amy Levy, Edith Ellis, and Amy Wilson Carmichael makes a convincing case for "minor writers" who "complicate both the 'supplemental' character and the identitarian politics of much feminist literary history" (205). As an alternative to the Atlantis myth, frequently used as a metaphor for feminist literary history despite its "implicat[ion] in nationalist and imperialist ideologies" (120), Marjorie Stone puts forth the "open Atlantic" paradigm and examines the "affiliations connecting" the anti-slavery writing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacob "across the boundaries of gender, race, class, nationality, and the Atlantic" (138). These essays clearly demonstrate the [End Page 147] limitations of reading women's texts only in relation to each other, and in opposition to male writers (ironically, no male critics appear in this collection). But they also proceed with appropriate caution. King admits concern that a move "beyond" separatist models might "take the edge off feminist opposition" and jeopardize feminist literary history's "raison d'être when it ceases to commit itself to the strenuous imagining of a female-centered tradition" (56). Essays by Ann B. Shteir, Carole Gerson, Suzanne Raitt, Sally O'Driscoll, and Antonia Forster outline other ways in which women's literary history might move beyond existing narratives. Shteir argues for the inclusion of women's science writing (such as that of Phebe Lankester) in accounts of women's literary history. Gerson offers a compelling reassessment of Pauline Johnson's poetry; and Raitt proposes May Sinclair's work on the Brontës and its "feminist language of fictional remembrance" (188) as a dynamic and "alternative metaphor for the operations and investments of feminist literary history: haunting, the re-embodiment of the dead" (189). Reflecting on the writing of a "lesbian" literary history, O'Driscoll states that it must be outlined in "conjunction with history" and in relation to...

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