Rebel Women

BOOK REVIEWS ering the work of the Cambridge ritualist Jane Harrison, "one of the most celebrated thinkers of her day," influenced herself by Nietzsche and Bachofen, and deeply influential for many modernist writers. Harrison 's work, although forgotten for decades, is, Torgovnick argues, relevant again today. Harrison, Torgovnick points out, argued that Greek culture had its roots in Egypt, predating Martin Bernal's work by some eighty years. (What she does not mention is that Bernai, although referencing Harrison, appears not to acknowledge this.) As in many of these essays, the discussion of the texts is tantalisingly brief, but it is good all the same to have attention drawn to Harrison's work. In the final section Wilfrid Stone gives a moving account of the sense of loss Forster registers in the face of the machine and urban expansion, while Margaret Goscilo unpacks illuminatingly the skillful encoding in the Merchant Ivory films of the homosexual subtext of Forster's "Italian comedies." Paul Delany looks at Nostromo as "the single major novel in English that engages not imperialism, but the rival formations of Cobdenite liberalism and internationalism," formations which prefigure present day economic imperialism and globalization. Michael Maegan, drawing on Lacan and post-Lacanians, looks at the moments in The Secret Agent when the narration confronts the impossibility of representing violence, "the Real in all its traumatic obduracy," an adept textual reading which concludes by suggesting these "points of asymbolic blockage " might best be read in terms of the intellectual and social dilemmas and impasses of the modernist vision. Some essays in this collection are more innovative than others, but I found every one had something stimulating to contribute. Fourteen pieces in 266 pages felt somewhat constricted, and many of the essays raise worthwhile points rather than working them through. But to end a book wishing it had been longer can only be to its credit. Helen Carr Goldsmiths College, University of London Rebel Women Jane Eldridge Miller. Rebel Women: Feminism, Modernism and the Edwardian Novel. 1994, Virago Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ν + 241pp. Paper $15.95 VIRGINIA WOOLF must have had a reason for claiming that a profound shift in human character occurred around December 1910. Placing the change she imagined in the late-Edwardian era, rather than 347 ELT 41 : 3 1998 at the beginning of the Great War, gives an elusive significance to a period that—today—seems notable mainly for the fact that it would soon be altered forever. In Rebel Women, newly available in America, Jane Eldridge Miller also claims that something striking was happening in the writing ofthat day: feminist thought began to influence popular fiction . Could this be part of what Woolf meant, one wonders—the idea that traditional romantic novels centered around marriage had become formally and thematically inadequate for depicting the ideological temper at the turn of the century, and that novel-writing changed as a result? In Rebel Women, Miller supports this idea by examining realist fiction written by and about women, the "marriage problem" novel, treatments of single women and suffragists, and the innovations of May Sinclair and H. G. Wells; in so doing, she provides a valuable reassessment of the development of the British novel 1900-1914, demonstrating that feminist thought provided a particular ideological pressure on content and form that would eventually help provoke modernist experimentation. Miller begins by pointing out the by-now-familiar failure of standard literary histories to acknowledge, let alone account for, changes related to women and fiction that began at the end of the nineteenth century. Both women's novels and fiction about women were affected by the contemporary context of reaction to the "New Woman" figure, abetted by suffrage and public awareness of women's social conditions. A "large number of novels by women and men" placed "modern women and their particular concerns at the center of their narratives"; in fact, as Miller points out, "[at] the time, it was generally accepted that women and feminism were making a significant impact on the course of British fiction ." Miller's emphasis on this "revolution" in literary contents is of particular importance since critics who focus on standard formal indicators as precursors...