Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader ed. by Sylvia Bowerbank, Sara Mendelson

you, but I want to adopt you [laughing]” (182). York’s "epilogue” is aptly entitled: “Giving Each Other the Gears, We Are Still Engaged.” Negative tenure and promotion decisions are evidence, according to York, of the deep suspicion with which humanities divisions of North American universities typically regard collaborative work, yet “any reader of this present study would soon be disabused of the notion that collabora­ tion represents the easy way out” (188). Recently, however, “’collaborative’ is just as trendy a label as ‘interdisciplinary’ in academic circles, particu­ larly in government-sponsored academic grant councils” (183), including ssh rc . While the university recognizes and rewards scholarly merit on an individual basis, York’s search of the ssh rc website produced 81 hits for “collaborative.” One of its richest grant programs is the m c r i, which aims “to promote collaborative research as the central mode of research activ­ ity.” Consequently, her book concludes with a call for a review of tenure and promotion policies. For initiating this discussion, we owe Lorraine York a debt of gratitude, even if, in her determination neither to reduce the collaborative whole to merely the sum of its parts nor to essentialize women, she retreats from provocatively “lesbianizing authorship” to zanily herding cats. Wendy Robbins University ofNew Brunswick Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson, eds. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000. Pp. 332. Siy.py paper. For anyone who has wanted to teach something of Margaret Cavendish’s prodigious output, the difficulty has always been in making selections from her vast and varied literary corpus and in securing well-edited, affordable texts. Sara Mendelson and Sylvia Bowerbank have prepared an edi­ tion-conceptualized as a “reader”—of Cavendish’s writings that will solve these problems for all but the most advanced teaching needs. In little more than 300 pages, they provide the complete texts of three of Cavendish’s most discussed works—A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life; The Convent ofPleasure; and The Description ofthe New World, Called the Blazing World—a good cross-section of material from her other writings, a number of thematically-related texts by her contemporaries (including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis), a chronology and bibliography, and an infor­ mative and engaging critical introduction. As is to be expected, the choice of 290 IStraznicky texts and editorial method are open to disagreement, but the edition works beautifully as a handle—for teaching purposes—on an important but until now largely inaccessible literary figure. Paper Bodies is organized into three clusters of texts, each one focused on a topic that helps to situate Cavendish within a specific critical and histor­ ical context. The first cluster, “Birth, Breeding, and Self-Fashioning,” includes Cavendish’s autobiography, selections from her ccxi Sociable Letters, the preface to her Orations ofDivers Sorts, and a letter of Mary Evelyn’s describ­ ing first-hand Cavendish’s self-promotional rhetoric. Together these texts build up a picture of Cavendish as a woman of her own making, someone who shaped her social and literary identity both in dialogue and in tension with contemporary ideologies. As the corresponding section of the intro­ duction explains, this cluster is meant to complicate our understanding of Cavendish’s writing as self-reflexive, a complication that is vital to a critical reading of an author who writes almost exclusively about her own thoughts and experiences. One could imagine adding to this cluster a section from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (which is surprisingly absent from the bibliography) to encourage some theoretical reflection on the relationship between literature and identity more generally. The second cluster, “Gender and Serious Play,” is less effective. The core text is Cavendish’s most popular play, The Convent of Pleasure, accom­ panied by the preface to the reader from The Worlds Olio and selected Female Orations from Orations ofDivers Sorts. The selection of materials to accompany the play, and the interpretive framework set up in the intro­ duction, focus exclusively on Cavendish’s representation of gender politics. Although some attention is given to matters of genre, particularly in relation to Cavendish’s use of masque in the play, the emphasis in the supporting...

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