Vathek with The Episodes of Vathek, and: The Recess; or A Tale of Other Times (review)

REVIEWS157 perceptive preface and introduction to the Female Spectator, and her insistence on the need to distinguish Haywood the author from her periodical's persona is salutary: as King observes, critics would "have little trouble distinguishing Mr Spectator, let us say, from either Addison or Steele" (set 2:2, x). In her review, in a previous number of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (14 [2001], 121), of Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Bocchicchio's Passionate Fictions ofEliza Haywood (2000),Juliette Merritt observes that "the publication of this welcome volume of essays marks a pivotal moment in Haywood scholarship, a moment in which we can discern developing areas of interest , and ascertain which critical methods and strategies are producing worthwhile results and what preoccupations and prejudices have been left behind." The almost simultaneous publication of Selected Works ofEliza Haywood (2000-2001 ) will surely provoke much further revaluation of this kind. Discussions of Haywood as a novelist will now be more inclined to consider her epistolary productions and to study her "writing to the moment" technique, which prefigured its development by Richardson. Theatre historians will be compelled to consider Haywood as a drama critic, as well as a playwright and actress. Most important, I believe, the full significance of the Female Spectatorwill now be recognized. Cultural historians and feminist critics, who have found a wealth of material to study in Addison and Steele's Spectator, will surely turn their attention to Haywood's fascinatingly heterogenous periodical. In his general introduction to the Selected Works, Pettit expresses the hope that Haywood will "endure as a subject of scholarly attention" (set 1:1, xi). Thanks in part to his labours, and to those of his fellow editors, she will. Peter Sabor McGiIl University William Beckford, Vathekvrìth The Episodes of Vathek. Ed. Kenneth W. Graham. Peterborough, Ont: Broadview Press, 2001. 397pp. $16.95; US$12.95; £7.95. ISBN 1-55111-281-7. Sophia Lee. The Recess; or A Tale of Other Times. Ed. April Alliston. Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 2000. lii + 364pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-0978-7. The history of the text ofWilliam Beckford's Vathek is exceedingly complex. Written first in French in 1782 when its author was a mere twenty-one years old, it was published in English, without his permission, by his translator 158EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 and collaborator, the Reverend Samuel Henley, four years later. It was then hastily translated back into French and published by Beckford on the Continent in two different versions, first at Lausanne and then in Paris. Further English editions appeared in subsequent years. After he had written Vathek, Beckford turned his hand to other Oriental tales, the Epuodes, which he intended to publish together with the original work. But things did not go smoothly, as the circumstances of his life changed dramatically. In particular , a scandal (the "Powderham scandal") following an alleged homosexual relationship with a young kinsman, William Courtenay, effectively banished Beckford from English society. Worse was to follow. His devoted and muchloved wife, Lady Margaret, died after giving birth to their second daughter. Henley's unauthorized publication of Vathek completed the annus horribilh of 1786. Kenneth Graham, in producing Vathek with the Epuodes as one text, is reverting to Beckford's original intention, an editorial decision that can be challenged. The most remarkable thing about Graham's edition is its inclusion of a new version of the first of the Epuodes, known as the "Story of Prince Alasi and the Princess Firouzkah." This tale, about the infatuation of an autocratic and violent Prince for a beautiful stranger, Prince Firouz, was always marred by a clumsy gender change at a vital point in the romance . Prince Firouz is suddenly turned into Princess Firouzkah. Given Beckford's own experience after Powderham, the motive is not difficult to guess at. Nevertheless the change, though awkward, never concealed for the modern reader the overtly homosexual nature of the Firouzkah version , as I made clear in the introduction to my own edition of the Epuodes (1994). Graham claims that his discovery of the new text (in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) , in which there is no such change of gender, removes the...