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ELT 36:3 1993 density that requires careful reading. It is, however, quite definitely worth the trouble. In addition to all of the information it supplies, City of Dreadful Delight provides a theoretical conceptualization of the manner in which publicly shared narratives help to shape matters as diverse as science, intellectual history, and personal feelings. Dr. Walkowitz is ultimately very convincing about the extent to which our ways of understanding and talking about heterosexual relations in public arenas were given form and language in the 1880s. Sally Mitchell Temple University Women and the Bildungsroman Penny Brown. The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of SelfDevelopment in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ix + 259pp. $45.00 IN THE POISON at the Source, Penny Brown has written an incisive study of a group of English women writers who published most of their fiction in the earlier twentieth century. She focuses on selected works by five authors in particular, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Rosamond Lehmann, Antonia White, and Dorothy Richardson. Brown devotes a chapter to works by each of them, with Richardson's fiction receiving the most extended attention. In a short conclusion, Brown touches very briefly but helpfully on the work of seven or eight other women writers, some of them less well known than her five principal subjects. Brown's immediate interest is in the novel of self-development, or Bildungsroman, as written by women authors. Citing students of the form, Brown lists some of its conventions, but she points out at the same time that the genre has been viewed from the perspective of the male protagonists in such fictions and of their male creators. She lists some of the form's "typical ingredients" as "the influences of childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality versus the city, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation, a working philosophy and eventual integration (or sometimes failure to integrate, withdrawal or alienation)." Brown argues that the male perspective in the novel of self-development is essentially an affirmative one. That is, the ethos of the genre holds that human perfectibility is possible and that historical and social progress will foster the ample development of the various aspects of the protagonist's personality. Brown refers to novels with central male characters who do not unambiguously succeed in 354 BOOK REVIEWS projecting their selves into significantly larger existences than the ones in which they start out, as in Dickens's Great Expectations, or who even die disillusioned, as in Hardy's Jude the Obscure. But, she writes, the same novels demonstrate the fuller development and the greater field of experience available to males in male novels of self-development than to females in novels of self-development by and about women. Indeed, quoting a passage from Dorothy Richardson that provides Brown with the title for her study, she argues in support of her thesis that for women characters in novels of self-development by women writers in early twentieth-century England, life was poisoned at the very source. The pervasive, intrusive network of patriarchal social arrangements and moral and economic structures militated against the significant development of the self in females from their very infancy. Brown's excellent analyses reveal that the conventions of the genre as they are used to project the development of female characters by her five authors often have a decidedly negative cast. In citing her remarks on the presentation of childhood, for example, as a convention in novels both by males and by females, I would especially refer to her striking observation that in novels by females childhood is sometimes presented "not so much . . . [as] the beginning of the maturation process as . . . simply a prolonging of a dependent. . . state." Childhood is viewed not just as a significant stage of development, but as "a metaphor for the general dependent state of women with its nameless urges, unspoken frustrations and impotence in the face of social restrictions." Another example of the conventions taking different forms in women's fiction from those in male fiction is in the matter of endings. Most of the female protagonists end up alone, and especially in the...

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