Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (review)

The Lesbian has a long association with double entendre. She is, in many literary accounts, strangely dual, a woman multiplied: she might lead a double life, be a shadowy other, love her sister, kill in pairs, be caught kissing her image in a mirror. In "Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts," Barbara Creed discusses the consequences of this doubling effect, arguing that "the lesbian double threatens because it suggests a perfectly sealed world of desire from which man is excluded" (Sexy Bodies, ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn [1995] 101). Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture asks what happened when late-Victorian women lived, loved, and also wrote together—when dualism was expressed through literary collaboration. Jill R. Ehnenn focuses her study through four principle dyads: Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and "Kit" Anstruther-Thompson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Did these couples' self-sufficiency threaten others? Ehnenn quotes a passage from Somerville's essay "Two of a Trade" (1946) in which Somerville recalls how family and friends regarded the Somerville and Ross books as "chiefly the Mutiny of two playmates." Their novels inspired resentful, relentless pursuit which Somerville illustrates thus: on overhearing sounds of a "search party on their track," the two authors fled "to the kitchen garden where they laid themselves at full length between rows of umbrageous Cabbage, remaining motionless while the pursuit swept by" (53). Somerville's shadowy vegetal hideout is hilarious in its banality, clever in its inversion of a hunting trope (Somerville and Ross were consummate hunters and horsewomen), earthily sexy in a way that prefigures the feeling for turf and furrow in The Well of Loneliness (1928), conspiratorially odd, and inventively fugitive. It is exactly these elusive kinds of textures that Ehnenn's study tracks and recaptures with superb agility.

Ehnenn describes her book as, in part, a recovery project, which it undoubtedly is. But some feminist and gay recovery scholarship runs into trouble when the effort to "rescue" the text or the author from the elisions of history and the academy flattens out some of the unevenness—oddness—that made it interesting in the first place. The opening pages of Women's Literary Collaboration had me worried that it would end up, for example, making Bradley and Cooper more feminist heroines than members of a male artistic coterie, or interpreting collaboration romantically as utopian literary production. But Ehnenn emphatically turns on these very notions: co-authorship is "not an Edenic refuge for female agency" (13); and joint authorship was sometimes truer in name than in practice, as in the case of Bradley and Cooper, who "generally wrote in separate rooms" (32). It's true that Ehnenn does privilege transgression, resistance, and nonconformity as the critical endpoints of her argument in ways that sideline the trickier questions of these authors' conservatism, class and economic privilege, and masculine identifications. But en route she both acknowledges these blind spots and provides us with a level of detail and delicacy of analysis that makes up for it.

The organization of the book matches the topic of integrated writing: the four main chapters are not case studies of each writing couple but are practice-based—writing, looking, performing, historicizing. They cover a large generic range, encompassing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, and—importantly—drama. Although the title does not indicate it, this study places particular emphasis on the visual arts: ekphrastic poetry, the material aesthetics of a text, drama, and fine art. The work on theatre is particularly welcome since scholars have shied from engaging Field's daunting dramatic oeuvre, and Ehnenn tackles both The Tragic Mary (1890) and A Question of Memory (1893) with aplomb. She pairs the latter with Robins and Bell's Alan's Wife, since both were first performed in the same year, both feature madness, both suffered hostile critical reactions, and both, she...