The Reappearance of Miss Miles

BOOK REVIEWS their day may have been read by the authors we regard in our time. For example, Wells read a considerable amount of what today we might designate as "junk literature," and he, like many of his contemporaries, occasionally appropriated such ephemera for the purposes of revision, enhancement, or parody. With Bleiler's volume, an author's stray allusion or a critic's stray suspicion has a better chance of being resolved. In other words, Bleiler's detailed annotations allow for a richer contextualization of those turn-of-the-century authors who matter most to us today. These annotations, furthermore, might even encourage the identification of a few other presently overlooked writers or works worthy of careful reconsideration. In a review of this volume Tom Easton wrote: "Serious scholars of SF might kill for it, but I don't expect many other individuals will want to own a copy" (Analog, 111 [October, 1991], 167). I understand his hesitation , but I think he is wrong. This book deserves to find an approving audience well beyond science-fiction critics, and even beyond ELT scholars . Bleiler's tome is an invaluable, meticulous resource, not in the least expensive considering the average selling price these days of university press books of a mere 250 pages. Moreover, Bleiler's effort exudes an exuberant care, a keen devotion, that many readers, I am sure, will find a delightful incentive to keep company with Science Fiction: The Early Years. William J. Scheick University of Texas at Austin The Reappearance of Miss Miles Mary Taylor. Miss Miles: A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago. Intro. Janet H. Murray. 1890; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. xxviii + 466 pp. $29.95 THE TITLE of this 1890 novel is deceiving, leading the reader to the natural assumption that Sarah Miles—the plucky young village girl in this "Tale of Yorkshire Life"—is the protagonist. In actuality, however, Mary Taylor wrote a novel with a collective protagonist, a core group of characters, all women, whose combined stories create, as Janet H. Murray observes in her introduction to this centenary edition, a kind of "feminist bildungsroman." While the title prepares us for a traditional narrative format in which the activities of a central character will be highlighted against the backdrop of her community, the novel subverts this expectation. In Miss Miles, a community is the main character, in 487 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 this case a small group of women whose activities are not foregrounded, but are embedded, intricately interwoven, in the social fabric of the world in which they live. Thus does Taylor illustrate the ways in which that world particularly hinders female growth: her central characters must constantly strive to overcome hardships wrought by lack of education , inability to join in productive remunerative work, and cultural pressure to relinquish their independence by marrying. In subject as well as form, Miss Miles is quietly revolutionary. While the obviously "feminist" aspects of the novel may be the primary reason for its reappearance one hundred years after its initial publication and decades since it was last available in print, it merits reconsideration for other reasons as well. The documented friendship between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë, for instance, raises the question of literary influence, and our knowledge of their long separation while Taylor sought her living in New Zealand lends a fascinating dimension to the characterizations in Miss Miles of Dora and Maria, childhood friends who are separated when ill-fortune forces Maria out into the world to earn her own livelihood. As Janet Murray explains, Mary and Charlotte, like Dora and Maria, exchanged eager letters across the miles, creating a kind of "psychological lifeline" to alleviate their physical and intellectual isolation. Mary's letters to Charlotte, however, were not always entirely supportive, for Mary was scornful of Charlotte's passive submission to her father's will and repeatedly urged Charlotte to seek a more independent life elsewhere. Although Mary was an influential force behind Charlotte's well-documented sojourn in Brussels (during which Charlotte endured unrequited love for her married professor, M. Heger), she never succeeded in exhorting her more timid friend to the level of independence she herself...