Women, the Dramatic Imagination & WW I

ELT 45 : 4 2002 dite, delightful, and harrowing by turns. It is certainly interesting that the apolitical post-1922 Lawrence could be admired by someone as right-wing as Williamson and as left-wing as Shaw. Williamson in The Gold Falcon and Shaw in Too True to Be Good portrayed Lawrence in the light of their own visions, but the rich complexity of his life and works, including these letters, eludes any of the deceptively clear characterizations of him that biographers, commentators, creative writers, critics, or friends have attempted to impose. Reading these sets of letters to different correspondents allows the reader to move toward finding his or her own Lawrence, and we must be grateful to the Wilsons for persisting in gathering this vast correspondence together, and for making it available in so attractive a format. Stephen Tabachnick ______________ University of Memphis Women, the Dramatic Imagination & WW I Claire M. Tylee, ed. Women, The First World War and the Dramatic Imagination: International Essays (1914-1999). Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. χ + 283 pp. $89.95 THIS VOLUME, the thirtieth in the Mellen Press series on Women's Studies, has much to recommend it to students of the Transition era, both as it deals with works from the period and with imaginative responses to the Great War. More useful to students of dramatic literature as literature than to students of the theatre, more shading, at times, into professorial jargon than into clarity of expression, and more mindful of political purpose, the fifteen essays or papers in the text have many important and insightful reflections, syntheses, and suggestions for additional research. The volume's aims, to be international, to represent different periods, to represent different kinds of drama, to be gynocritical , and to be political are well met in a book in which the essays "are not primarily concerned with the aesthetics of the plays or the details of their productions" but instead "deal with the political positions which the plays embody and the ways in which formal aspects of the plays enable different kinds of feminist politics to become manifest." Given the scope of the volume, with seven essays directly relevant to the 18801920 period, one concerned with the 20s, and the remainder concerning historical writing of the 1970s-1990s, I will limit my comments to those works which have principal appeal to the ELT readership. Gill Plain's paper on the modernity of Vernon Lee's Satan the Waster ( 1920) examines the modernist feel of the play and its surprising nature. 470 BOOK REVIEWS One element Lee refashioned into her play, The Ballet of Nations, had appeared in 1915 as a blatantly anti-war publication, a daring enterprise at the time, especially in light of the fate of other writers who attempted misunderstood satire (Shaw, for example). Plain also examines the work as anticipatory of Virginia Woolf s radical assertions in the 1930s and of Bertolt Brecht's theory of the Alienation effect. Vernon Lee has undergone some revaluation of late; this essay is clearly part ofthat fresh approach to her work, though the analogues to many of Lee's citations in the "canon," phrases she seems to have borrowed directly from Walter Pater and others echoing T. S. Eliot, might have gotten a brief mention. It is noteworthy that Vernon Lee did not think of the play as being staged but more as a work to be imagined. A German writer who had fallen into obscurity despite a prolific career as the author of fourteen novellas, nineteen novels, numerous poems , short stories, and two plays (one of which was only recovered in the 1990s), Friede Kraze receives well-deserved recognition from Hilde Klein, whose essay on Erfüllungen (Fulfilment, 1915) is a skillful analysis of the play, of Germany in war years, and of the varied German positions on the war. In particular her treatment of the play as a work that shows "the devastating consequences of the excesses of patriotism" leads to Klein's consideration of the work as "a didactic play displaying the dangers and consequences of fanaticism, and the horror and absurdity of war." This is clearly a play that belongs in anyone's repertory of war...