With a Pen in Her Hand: Women and Writing in Italy in the Nineteenth Century and beyond by Verina R. Jones , Anna Laura Lepschy (review)

MLR, 99.1, 2004 217 precludes all attitudes other than the author's from rearing their heads during improvisation .) Missing is a discussion of the historical pressures then acting on Goldoni, whose innovations enlarging the roles ofwomen and the underclasses, acknowledging their value, and challenging the false notion of a virtuous aristocracy had brought a hostile reaction from critics, audiences, and the authorities. Their calls for a more conventional morality met largely with his acquiescence, yet he persisted where he could in setting forthmore innovative views. As Franca Angelini notes in her Vita di Goldoni (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1993), pp. 108-09 (not included in Giinsberg's bib? liography), the moralizing prefaces of the comedies of these years contrast markedly with the values embodied in the characters, most evidently in the case oiLa locandiera (1750), whose preface's punitive attitude towards independent women is belied by the play and its 'ammirazione evidente per Mirandolina'. Chapters V and VI provide a description of patriarchal hegemony that is a tour de force. Giinsberg has a fine understanding of the role of co-operation and competition in the male dynamic, and of male tendencies to foster female competition to prevent the formation among women of the kind of gender solidarity that permits men to dominate. She also elucidates female acquiescence. The opportunity for a more comprehensive theoretical paradigm would have been afforded by the inclusion in her discussion of Barbara Smuts's analysis of male aggression against women and of Goldoni's further innovations in developing roles for irregular men of the higher classes excluded from privileges by youth, paternal disfavour, or disordered behaviour. Given Giinsberg's emphasis on resisting patriarchal hegemony, her limited discus? sion of La locandiera (pp. 123-24, almost an aside and focusing on the Cavaliere rather than integrating considerations of Mirandolina's employee-husband) and Barufe ciozote (1762) is surprising and disappointing, given the feasible and realistic means of diminishing male dominance that they describe. It is, however, a predictable re? sult of the book's conservative approach and the truncated understanding of realism. Goldoni's solution shares a number of elements with those described by Smuts as muting male violence towards women. Mirandolina enjoys the most favourable form of it as sole heir to a piece of family property that ensures a stable income permitting her to attract and reject the upper-class male, and to hire a man whom she then marries and can control through her economic power while she (as is hinted) takes advantage ofthe opportunities offered by a transient clientele, furtherprotected by a state particularly ready to safeguard its citizens fromforeigners and disorder. Goldoni is too wise about the human social dynamic to refrain from including in these plays allusions to the disadvantages of blocking the male co-operation necessary to amassing abundant wealth and power: a permanently modest social status and income. Newcomb College, Tulane University Linda L. Carroll With a Pen in her Hand: Women and Writing in Italy in the Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Edited by Verina R. Jones and Anna Laura Lepschy. (Society for ltalian Studies, Occasional Papers, 5) Leeds: Society for ltalian Studies. 2000. x +120 pp. ?14. ISBN 0-9525901-5-8. With a Pen in her Hand contains the papers delivered in February 1997 at a two-day conference organized jointly by the Centre for ltalian Women's Studies at the Uni? versity of Reading and the Centre for ltalian Studies at University College London. The impressive line-up of speakers from the UK, Italy, France, and Canada and, not least, the welcome participationof two major ltalian creative writers and critics, Giuliana Morandini and Francesca Sanvitale, signal the ambitious nature of that event as 218 Reviews does the range of genres covered?from the novel, travel writing, conduct books, and social enquiry to journalism, lyric poetry, and theatre. As in 1997, the contribution by Morandini is in firstposition, an appropriate choice given her anthology La voce che e in lei (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), a seminal ltalian work on the subject of women's writing in this same period. Indeed, her pioneering role is acknowledged in several papers in the volume. In tribute to the Reading...

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