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Book Reviews tocracy." At the time, Shaw was 88, and Nancy was 65. During Shaw's final illness and immediately after Shaw's death, Nancy presided as if his wife, speaking to the print press and the rolling cameras, making decisions and arrangements. That the feeling between these two formidable personalities was genuine cannot be doubted; it was all the more remarkable, given that they faced each other from the left and right ends of the political spectrum. But then Shaw loved paradox, and as an example of just how politically paradoxical he could be, I offer the following from the editor's annotations: in a 1 February 1942 letter to The Times, Shaw proposed that incomes over £20,000 be exempt from income tax on the grounds that this "would encourage people and stimulate the economy"—a proposal which J. P. Wearing calls "an early version of'Reaganomics.'" While that may seem the ultimate paradox, it is perhaps worth remembering that a paradox is only an apparent contradiction , and in any case Shaw was for independent thinking no matter what. JOHN A. BERTOLINI --------------------------- Middlebury College Sexual & Cultural Theatrical Dissidence Penny Farfan. Women, Modernism, and Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 173 pp. $75.00 THE BREVITY of Women, Modernism, and Performance (119 pages of text) belies its weighty subject matter. This study encompasses a wide variety of genres—play, novel, lecture, dance, pageant—and artists : actresses Elizabeth Robins and Ellen Terry; authors Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf; theatre artist Edith Craig; and choreographer /dancer Isadora Duncan—with Henrik Ibsen ("a central figure in the development of feminist modernism") as recurring leitmotif . These seven practitioners, according to Farfan, were instrumental in interpreting and transforming the way gender is represented in art and life, and "their responses to dramatic literature and theatrical practice in effect constituted feminist critical discourse both through theatre and about theatre itself." The book examines their contribution to the formation of "a historic counter-public sphere in which modernist aesthetic concerns and first-wave feminist concerns productively coincided to infuse feminist subjectivity into public discourse on gender and culture." We begin with Elizabeth Robins, who played Hedda in the 1891 London première oÃ- Hedda Gabler (1890) as well as six other Ibsen characters . But the tenor of When We Dead Awaken (1899)—female happiness sacrificed to male ambition—so appalled Robins that it triggered a 201 ELT 49 : 2 2006 réévaluation of Ibsen's work and put an end to her decade of staging his drama. In her unpublished 1908 lecture, "Some Aspects of Henrik Ibsen," she concludes that although he did more than anyone else "to give the coup de grace to the old conception of a heroine as a creature half angel, half idiot," Ibsen remained "far from realizing what is called the feminist point of view" (which Farfan infers from the lecture as meaning "women's recognition and transcendence of subordination "). Her 1907 suffrage play Votes for Women, examined at length, is thus a revision of Ibsen's drama and compensates for the failings outlined in her lecture. Next comes Ellen Terry, who, in an 1891 essay, referred to Hedda Gabler and Nora Helmer (heroine of A Doll's House) as "silly ladies" and "foolish women," arguing that Ibsen's plays are "preposterously unreal—untrue to nature" (her emphasis). This attitude is not surprising in light of Terry's controversial 1888 Lyceum Macbeth, in which she played a humanized Lady Macbeth whose "crime of complicity in murder ," as Farfan puts it, "was, as Terry saw it, a logical extension of wifely devotion." This interpretation "cast the 'womanly woman' in a disturbing new light" while challenging "contemporary gender ideology that made Ibsen's work so provocatively disturbing to nineteenth-century audiences." Moreover, Terry's four Shakespeare lectures—presented in Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States between 1910 and 1921—"contributed to emergent feminist discourse through and about theatre and to the formation of a feminist counter-public sphere that coincides with and indeed was precipitated by the emergence of modern drama." Farfan then shifts to Virginia Woolf 's only play, Freshwater (1935), whose "creative androgyny" is...

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