Foreign Correspondence: News from England

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: NEWS FROM ENGLAND By John Stokes (University of Warwick) The period from 1880 to 1920 has long been fashionable in England but our literary critics are currently anxious to dissect the nostalgic images that are peddled by our TV producers. Consequently Wells is scrutinized for his ambivalent vision of technological society, Conrad for his critique of imperialism, James for his insights into moral crises brought on by the growth of corporate capitalism. Implicit in all these reappraisals is a conviction that our present cultural climate should have made us better equipped than ever to understand the literature of our fairly recent past. The most remarkable change in focus involves Thomas Hardy, for too long treated as an elegist of rural certainties. Editions of his letters and his novels, memoirs and biographies, all continue to appear, but for feminist critics Hardy now emerges as a central figure in the history of sexual politics. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative by Penny Boumelha (Harvester, 1981) continues the work of John Goode and Mary Jacobus with a stringent analysis of the ways in which Hardy's novels questioned the topical ideas upon which they were founded. This is a good example of literary deconstruction that includes historical context. We have at last discovered the New Woman and remembered that Edwardian writers were contemporaries of the suffragettes (some of them actually were suffragettes , of course!). Why were we ever allowed to forget? Certainly the Virago Press, Britain's premier feminist publishing house, is determined to ensure that it does not happen again. Much acclaim is due to Virago, who now have inexpensive paperback editions (all with new introductions) of works by Charlotte Mew, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, the Pankhursts, Rebecca West and many others—including some relevant male authors. (West, incidentally, is still writing, and has recently provided a lively text for a picture book on the year 1900 [Weidenfeld]). Virago books often prompt reviewers to be more discursive than usual. The essays by Penelope Fitzgerald on Charlotte Mew and by Francis Wyndham on Ada Leverson— both in the London Review of Books, 1982—are well worth looking up, while forthcoming on the Virago list are three volumes of The Diaries of Beatrice Webb and reprints of George Egerton, Clementina Black, Elizabeth von Arnim, and more Schreiner. Another trend is towards critical survey that compares several authors in relation to each other. Stoddard Martin's Wagner to "The Waste Land" (Macmillan, 1982) diagnoses malingering Wagnerism in Symons, Shaw, Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot and many others. Ian Britain's Femianism and Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), though a work of political history rather than literary criticism, gives detailed information about how Morris, Shaw, Wells and Granville-Baker set about formulating a socialist approach to the arts. 78 The comparative method is also adopted by John Batchelor in The Edwardian Novelists (Duckworth, 1982) and by Allon White in The Uses of Obscurity (Routledge , 1981). Batchelor's is the more conventional treatment, though he does provide plenty of background. White is concerned to trace the extended; process whereby novelists made "obscurity" and "secrecy" part of their method—the development , in short, of "modernism." Important names occur in both books: White concentrates upon Meredith, Conrad and James, while Batchelor shows especial interest in Ford, Galsworthy and Forster. When dealing with any Edwardian novelist it is as well to take into account their conception of their audience: George Jefferson's Edward Garnett (Cape, 1981) is helpful in this respect since it shows how an influential publisher's reader could mediate between the changing marketplace and its frequently alienated authors. In addition to the ouput from major publishers much sound scholarship comes, as usual, from the little presses. Among the recent offerings are Brocard Sewell's Like Black Swans (Tabb House, 1982~essays on Corvo, Hardy, Chesterton, Custance et al.), June Badeni's The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Tabb House, 1981), Jean Moorcraft Wilson's I was an English Poet: A Critical Biography of Sir William Watson (Cecil Woolf, 1982) and The Scottish Sketches of R. D. Cunninghame Graham (Scottish Academic Press, 1982), and Myfanwy Thomas's sensitive memoir of her father, the poet...