Time & the New Woman

BOOK REVIEWS and but for the tears feel like a dry river bed... I wish I could force myself not to think and think of what I hate to think of." There is something very heartening watching Leonard relax in the certainty of Trekkie's affection. Although her letters are drier, less voluble in their assertions of love and friendship than his more ardent ones, the contrast gives the correspondence a necessary edge. He may feel "like an old dishevelled fowl now singing away its everlasting single & solitary tune," but he keeps singing/writing because "by writing to you I keep some part of you still with me.... [We] old Bloomsburyites ... are terribly bony & brainy, I think, & practice a kind of bleak intellectual ruthlessness upon one another. I again got from you an extraordinary refreshment of spirit. . . . you have in you always the very stuff in which poetry—lyric poetry—consists" (25 May 1944,135). That letter incidentally contains a quotation from Charles Elton's Luriana, the poem that sounds throughout To the Lighthouse. In some ways this book serves as an echo chamber for the last volume of Woolf s autobiography and clearly makes good on that volume's title, The Journey not the Arrival Matters. But if Woolf is in some degree oddly absent from his autobiographies, he is entirely present here. Judith Adamson was right, I think, to print the complete correspondence, for even the trivial details—the many cats' many ailments, for example—matter in the end. Known for her important work on Graham Greene and, most recently, for her book on Charlotte Haldane (Charlotte Haldane: Woman Writer in a Man's World), Adamson has done a splendid job in the annotation and framing of these letters. The Leonard Woolf that emerges is at once familiar and new—and totally engaging. Judith Scherer Herz ______________ Concordia University Time & the New Woman Patricia Murphy. Time is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman. Albany. State University of New York Press, 2001. χ + 291 pp. Cloth $68.50 Paper $22.95 TIME, for Patricia Murphy, is the Victorian Great Pretender. In her monograph exploring temporal discourse and gender boundaries in New Woman fiction, Murphy effectively illustrates the ideological deceptiveness of Victorian theorisations of time. The linear model of time in vogue in the period might pose as a cultural commitment to progressive or evolutionary development. However, Murphy provides many ex181 ELT 46 : 2 2003 amples of the ways in which this model actually enforced "static conceptions of womanhood" in a covert fashion. Murphy's project is particularly ambitious, for she wishes to characterise New Woman novels as proto-modernist by focusing on attitudes to time, history and gender. Such a vast conceptual range, mediated as well through postmodernist theories of time and gender, requires tight argumentative control. For the most part Murphy succeeds. She systematically traces the ways in which views of temporality inscribe or challenge gender boundaries in six texts: She, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Sarah Grand's The Beth Book and The Heavenly Twins, The Daughters of Danaus by Mona Caird, and Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. Her overall argument is largely persuasive because of the abundant evidence she brings from close textual readings. The main thrust of this book is concerned with the cultural subordination of women in the nineteenth century, not perhaps surprising in a selection of texts which engage—directly or indirectly—with the Woman Question. For Murphy, the fiction shows gender battlelines drawn everywhere. Rider Haggard and Hardy perpetuate the dominant masculine views of women as requiring marginalisation due to their dangerous degeneracy, their ahistorical connection to the primitive, and their inadequacies from an evolutionary viewpoint (all body rather than masterful intellect). Murphy's chosen female authors also chart women's subordination and cultural "erasure"; their writing shows they have no illusions about the constrained opportunities for women. But their astute deconstruction of women's oppression gains depth by its connection to the burdens of past traditions and historical expectations. Grand, for example, questions the so-called inferiority of women's development through time since this neglects female mental and creative talents . Caird shows how contemporary attitudes to...