Précis Reviews

ELT 49 : 3 2006 Précis Reviews I Nadine Cooper University of North Carolina at Greensboro Gallon, Tom. The Girl Behind the Keys. Arlene Young, ed. 1903; Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. 183 pp. Paper $15.95 BELLA THORN is down to her last sixpence in the "great and brutal world" of London, "[v]ery cold, very tired, and remarkably miserable," having spent the dregs of her money in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a governess position. Failing at this traditional role, the self-sufficient Bella resorts to answering an enigmatic advertisement for a typist, working for an ambiguously named and suspect firm, Secretarial Supply Syndicate, Limited. From the very start, Bella realizes there are nefarious forces at work—foiled kidnappings, financial schemes, and stolen diamonds abound; thus, while maintaining her businesslike mien toward her employers and assuring them that she is just a machine, the "typewriter," she secretly works to unravel the mysteries of the firm. Gallon imagines in the character of Bella the precursor to, as Young describes, "the worldly women who inhabit the realm of the hard-boiled detective," the New Woman who at the turn of the century is now "prepared to encounter the seamiest side of human nature and human interaction." In face of adversity, Bella embraces an "all in a day's work" philosophy; just as she finds herself in the absurd position of having to hide behind a rack of clothes while hoping that her exposed shoes blend in with the other empty ones, she also worries about honestly earning her salary of three pounds a week—never mind that the boss is an intimidating man with shady business connections and laughs at odd times, or that she has the leisure to read novels for extended periods. In fact, it is the humor in The Girl Behind the Keys that makes it worth a read. Certainly, as Young points out, the story is very interesting in terms of the juxtaposition of Victorian suspicions concerning technology—the typewriter as a supernatural machine—to the modern interest in new urban communication, networks. The fun lies in Gallon's understated satire and Bella's Woodhouse-like clients who drawl: "I hate writing letters, and I thought it wouldn't be half bad fun just to talk them, as it were, and see you tap them out on that wonderful typewriter." Hughes, Clair. Dressed in Fiction. New York: Berg Publishers, 2006. 214 pp. Cloth $99.94 Paper $29.95 CLOTHES make the novel on occasion, as Hughes indicates in her exploration of "the power of dress for the writer of fiction." Clothing has the "unsettling ability to arouse the passions, to seduce, disturb, deceive, and to threaten even the wearer with its occult 'otherness,'" and although "novelists do not, after all, send their characters naked into the world ... [literary] criticism has often acted as though they do." Hughes justifies her interest in a topic often more important to costume historians by asserting that dress is an integral part of 366 Book Reviews language and social codes. In this broad study ranging over two hundred years, Hughes considers works by Defoe, Austen, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot (even Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac paired with Richardson's Pamela in an interesting last chapter involving the missing wedding dress in literature ). Our readers might be drawn to chapter seven, "Shades of White: Henry James's 'Seige of London' and 'The Author of Beltraffio."' Hughes discusses the importance of the black/white contrast that James often uses in describing his characters' dress. One of James's "persistent themes" or motifs, white, is the symbol of both innocence and ignorance—the unraveling of which is a "necessary distinction" to James. His use of garments construct a "symbolic system" that "articulate the soul—in triumph or torment and oddly enough, in white." Lest we accuse Hughes of reading too much into clothes, she does not assert, as a satiric Swift in Tale of a Tub, that clothes represent the soul. Instead, she humorously concedes that her intention "is not to prove that dress is the hidden key to all the mysteries of these texts" but how "the author's employment of...