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BOOK REVIEWS ness abetted here by the theory of the counter-transference whereby the reader and writer sustain one another in an emotional support system, or to cite from Clayton's examples, "Henry James, more openly than Conrad, I succor in his loneliness" or "For D. H. Lawrence I am the longed for Blutbruder." Should one care, moreover, that Clayton feels "something like close to shame" in quoting a passage about Henry James's 1910 breakdown because it is "as if it were too intimate and likely to distort my experience of a great writer" or that T hear Virginia Woolf 's voice in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and other fictions as the voice of a mother, and I become a child"? The insistent recording of such responses fails to illuminate a given text or writer, for the reader is inevitably trapped in the otherness of individual response. The rhetoric, in fact, reveals itself to be anxious and insecure, and, not surprisingly, since points are often made by pleading and assertion than by argument: "The darkness is not the same as the void or nothingness. The darkness is a place below, prior to, values, to personality , but that place, far from being nada, is home!" Given its interests, this study is little concerned about the formal aspects of modernist practice—why and how, for instance, Forster's Austen-like prose can register a vision of the void as convincing as that Woolf conjures up through narrative discontinuity or Joyce through an alienating syntactic and allusive range—nor is it much concerned with the painstaking accumulation and distillation of evidence and careful establishment of critical perspectives on individual works. Its claims are frequently glittering generalities of breathtaking scope—"All modernist British and American fiction reveals the seductive pull of life under a false surface"—and they are, consequently, either platitudinous or unsustained . While an approach to modernism that would attempt to illumine, if not reconcile, some of the artist's intimate inner life with its (occasional ) manifestations in his or her art is surely a legitimate and potentially rich subject for scholarly inquiry, this work signally fails to contribute to that debate. J. H. Stape Chiba University, Japan Rebecca West Joan Garnet Packer. Rebecca West: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. xxviii + 136 pp. $20.00 REBECCA WEST (1892-1983) is another once highly esteemed writer 369 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 who appears to be sinking into oblivion. She is chiefly remembered, if at all, for her extended and turbulent relationship with H. G. Wells and the spiteful one with their son, Anthony West. Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, she began her public career as an aspiring actress, but finding no success in the theater turned to journalism. Her advanced political and suffragist views vexed and shocked her proper Scottish mother, so the young writer assumed the name of one of Ibsen's heroines, Rebecca West, by which she was known until her death, a Dame of the British Empire. As Professor Packer points out in the introduction of this book, "her career spanned much of the twentieth century." Her literary output was vast and she was recognized, as one critic noted, for "her hard, clear intelligence, of the sort which men like to call 'masculine'." In the admirable introductory survey, Packer continues her concise summary of West's life and the reception of her major works: She published over twenty books, most of which were well reviewed, and by 1980 she herself had written almost 1,000 reviews. None of this work has attracted much attention from scholarly critics, however, perhaps because of the eclectic nature of her writing as well as her somewhat unconventional personality. Widely read and encyclopedic in her knowledge, she wrote biography, history, literary criticism, and fiction in addition to journalism. Her opinions were forcefully expressed and often unorthodox; she had a mind of the most original sort. Although her writing tended to be traditional, it was vigorous, rich in imagery and description. At times the analytical nature of her mind made her difficult to follow.... In addition to her writing she attracted attention because of her personality. She was out...

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