Editing Women ed. by Ann M. Hutchinson (review)

REVIEWS139 and in his recent book The Reel Middle Ages (which extends beyond Arthurian films to all films with medieval themes). King Arthur on Film confirms that, through his exhaustive and important research and his judicious editing, Harty has virtually defined the field of Arthurian film studies. ALAN LUPACK University of Rochester ann M. Hutchinson, ed., EditingWomen. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 143 including 10 illustrations, isbn: 0-8020-8048-0. $40. (cloth) $14.95 (paper). Editing Women, which comprises six complex and erudite essays, begins with Joan Coldwell on the journals and autobiography of poet Anne Wilkinson (d. 1961), a Canadian. It then moves backward through time to texts by British writers: Naomi Black on Virginia Woolf's epistolary Three Guineas (1931—38), Isobel Grundy on the seventeenth-century letters and verses of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Germaine Greer on the eighteenth-century letters and poems of Katherine Philips, and Felicity Riddy on the prose Revelation ofLove by Julian ofNorwich (d. 'some time after 1462' [103]). In the final essay, Margaret Anne Doody comments on the preceding studies and ruminates on her editions of the novels and verses by Frances Burney as well as verses by Jane Austen. The intricacies of editorial work are evident throughout, such as identification of handwriting, attitudes offamilies owning primary sources and invested in constructing a certain image ofthe writer thereof, and methods bywhich to make a writer canonical. But this collection is not a how-to manual. Rather, it is a sophisticated exposition of textual criticism. These scholars theorize editorial practices, historicize their approaches, relate editorial problems to issues of interpretation, and demonstrate the inexorable influence editors have on the presentation and reception of texts and their writers. One of this book's values is the vivid clarity of the authors' reflections on all such angles of textual criticism. Equally valuable is this volume's distinctive perspective. Unlike other books on textual criticism published lately, the essays Ann M. Hutchinson has assembled are all by women scholars about women writers. Thus, the title refers not only to the activity ofpreparing editions ofprose and verse composed by women but also to the women who perform that editorial work on women's texts. The double meaning of the title captures the interplay between the textual critic and her subject. Within this dialectic lies an engaging problem: what does the woman editor bring to (and take away from) the woman's text she edits? Although 'proud to declare' herselfa 'feminist,' Doody wavers. As an editor she wishes to 'fescue' texts by men as well as by women (134, 138). Moreover, although women can bring new insights, such as rejection ofthe 'authoritative edition,' so can men who have not been 'brought up' on an older concept of what makes a 'proper' edition (137). Similarly, Grundy articulates the shaping of editorial practices during certain eras, e.g., by the goals ofcertain educational systems 140ARTHURIANA (72). Yet, she is sensitive to the 'special degree of contingency which the female condition has historically imposed on women's texts' (55). Black, on the other hand, is forthright about the necessity offeminists being women and the feminist objective ofher project: to analyze how gender operates in power relations (29). So is Coldwell (4), who, furthermore, sees herself as editor and Wilkinson as writer mirrored in an etching by Henry Moore of two nude women walking on a tightrope towards each other, one reaching out to the other yet the two never closing the gap between them (22-23). Besides offering such theoretical, professional, and political themes, Editing Women makes specific contributions to the scholarship on each of the writers. For instance, Greer's scrutiny ofletters, the 1664 edition ofPhilips's Poems, and certain manuscripts leads to unsettling possibilities about who rewrote some of Philips's poems and collaboration among 'Royalist coteries' (98). Of special interest to medievalists is Riddy's slant on Julian's Revelation ofLove. For instance, she rejects the recluse image manufactufed by medieval and modern editors. Instead, she develops the plausibility of collaboration between Julian and a female friend and amanuensis, with whom Julian might have emigrated from the north to East Anglia, perhaps upon marriage. Furthermore...

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