The Annotations in Lady Bradshaigh's Copy of "Clarissa", and: Samuel Richardson's New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and "Native" Virtue (review)

REVIEWS 105 at least, longed for the German text to refer to. Important related books such as Martha Woodmansee's The Author, Art and the Market (1994) appear in the notes, but not in the bibliography or index. The references to texts by Goethe are no use unless you happen to have the same edition. Names such as Janice Radway and Richard Steele are misspelled. And even German articles are occasionally incorrect (der for des, for example, in Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim). I know that university presses no longer have real editors—editors who might have questioned why Purdy spends so much time on early sumptuary laws, or on Frederick the Great's ragged Prussian uniform, in a book about eighteenth-century bourgeois consumers—but are copy editors disappearing, too? All these complaints aside, however, I continue to find Purdy's treatment offashion discourses as productive fictions very interesting. His book and other related work—such as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace's elegant and precise Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (1997) and the recent Bedford Cultural Series editions of the Tatler and the Spectator, The Rape of the Lock, and Evelina—will gradually force us to broaden our definition of "eighteenth-century fiction" to include the fictions created by all kinds of cultural expression—narrative and non-narrative, verbal and non-verbal. Elizabeth W Harries Smith College Janine Barchas, with Gordon D. Fulton. The Annotations in Lady Bradshaigh 's Copy of "Clarissa". English Literary Studies Monograph Series no. 76. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1998. 144pp. $14.50. ISBN 0-920604-59-5. Ewha Chung. SamuelRichardson 's New Nation: Paragons ofthe Domestic Sphere and "Native" Virtue. Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1998. vii + 162pp. US$36.95. ISBN 0-8204-3362-4. The most extraordinary sight in Lady Bradshaigh's copy of Clarissa is her thickly scrawled signature, "Do: Bradshaigh," written directly over Richardson's modest "From The Author" on every title-page. These inscriptions, as Janine Barchas says, are métonymie for the battle between author and reader to claim definitive "ownership" of Clarissa (p. 34). We have long known that Clarissa was process rather than product, but this copy provides direct evidence for Richardson's interactive method of composition when Lady Bradshaigh, unabashed by the authority of print, scribbles around and through Richardson's text, only to be answered by an author defending his own creation. Barchas rightly describes the result as a paratext, a holographic frame, "an almost Talmudic array of glosses upon glosses" (p. 9). Richardson, she argues, saw these comments as interpretive fissures needing to be bridged when he used 106 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:1 bullet points in the margins of the 175 1 editions "to do wholesale for Everyreader what he does retail for Lady Bradshaigh—highlighting with marginal notes and graphic marks new and 'important' text in order to correct 'bad' readings" (p. 15). Given Richardson's lifelong pattern of consultation and revision in the vain attempt to control interpretation, this argument is highly plausible. Disputes about social distinctions, costume, and spelling highlight differences between Richardson's radicalism and Lady Bradshaigh's conservatism. But her boldest attempt to wrench power from the author is her rewritten ending—she wants to see the "last outrage" attempted but not executed, and the two principal characters to have lived, though not married. We may marvel at this attenuation of Richardson's masterpiece, but, as Ruth Perry has pointed out, many women writers would reconstruct his tragedy. Even (I believe) Jane Austen. Janine Barchas writes fluently and well, and her transcription, on which Gordon D. Fulton has collaborated, is meticulous. Lady Bradshaigh's Clarissa raises vital questions about the authority of the author, the originality of composition, the allowable extent of reader response, the legitimacy of appropriating another's text—and the triumph of class over authorship. Ewha Chung is troubled by what she calls Richardson's obsession with the Protestant English nation. Arguing that his "thematic design for religious separation and national distinction" results in a "radical separatism," she decides that his nation "sealed off from the rest of the world" contains a "dark message" inculcating fear...