Wilde vs. Queensberry

ELT 47 : 3 2004 tative Leslie Stephen, moving then to the diary that Woolf began under the guidance of her husband Leonard, Martinson demonstrates that Woolf responded to the pressures of audience expectation by creating a highly self-conscious diary that fluctuates continually between "revelation and equivocation," "exposure and repression." Whereas Violet Hunt often displaces her self onto the more dominant presence of her "husband ," Ford Madox Ford, and Katherine Mansfield presents a highly performative self that often "mimics male expectation" of female identity , Woolf functions as a "stage manager" of sorts. She not only directs her audience to "multiple" and highly artful "proliferations" of herself and her world but also deflects to her fiction consideration of those topics —sexuality, madness, and feminist politics—that are especially sensitive and vulnerable to criticism. A particularly fascinating feature of this chapter is Martinson's account of Leonard and Virginia Woolf 's diary relationship, an on-going struggle involving Leonard's efforts to use the diary to exert control over Virginia and Virginia's strategies for undermining that control. Martinson complicates this account by addressing Virginia's awareness of the judgment of other men in her life, the writers and editors of her literary coterie: "Woolf sees Leonard's vigilant 'eye' and modernist males' jealous, exacting 'eyes' watching her when she sits down to write." What is impressive about Martinson's ambitious analysis of Virginia Woolf is her ability to illuminate both the writer's sensitivity to the assumptions, the judgments, the impositions of her male readers and her adeptness at creating a textual reality she could call her own. "'The pack may howl,'" Martinson quotes Woolf as saying, "'but it shall never catch me.'" Readers interested in Woolf should certainly give In the Presence of Audience a careful look. So, too, should readers interested in the diary writings of the other women featured in this study—Mansfield, Hunt, and Lessing—and in the sexual/textual politics of women's diary writing overall. CAROL HOLLY __________________ St. Olaf College Wilde vs. Queensberry The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. With an Introduction and Commentary by Merlin Holland. Foreword by Sir John Mortimer. London and New York: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2003. xliii + 331 pp. $27.95 Canada $42.95 VOLUMES ON THE TRIALS of Oscar Wilde began appearing as early as 1896 when Verlag Max Spohr in Leipzig published Der Fall Wilde und das Problem der Homosexualität. In 1948, H. Montgomery 352 BOOK REVIEWS Hyde published The Trials of Oscar Wilde for the Notable British Trials series, a second edition enlarged in 1962 and reprinted by Dover Publications in 1973. Merlin Holland praises it for its "admirable introduction , setting the trials in their proper context. . . ." The Hyde edition draws on the unpublished papers of Sir Edward Clarke, Wilde's lawyer, whose papers have since "disappeared." Holland writes that the 1962 "popular edition," while "eminently readable as a dramatic text at its time, should now be regarded as a much abbreviated and inaccurate rendering of the Queensberry trial" (3 to 5 April 1895), in which the Marquess was acquitted and to which Hyde devotes only fifty-two pages, whereas Holland's volume contains 280 pages of court testimony, including seventeen pages of "Police Court Proceedings" (2 and 9 March 1895) in Great Marlborough Street and more than fifty pages of Holland's introduction and annotations. (After Queensberry's acquittal, Wilde faced two criminal trials in the Central Criminal Court from 26 April to 1 May and from 20 to 25 May.) Edward Carson, representing Queensberry, subjected Wilde to a good deal of routine questioning, but the barrister's technique of suddenly asking questions of a sexual nature may have taken Wilde by surprise. One of the prominent witnesses was the young clerk Edward Shelley, employed by publishers Elkin Mathews and John Lane between 1890 and 1893 at the Bodley Head. Wilde had been introduced to Shelley. At that time, Wilde had rooms at the Albemarle Hotel; having referred to a private dinner at the hotel, Wilde was questioned by Carson: CARSON: Did he [Shelley] smoke cigarettes with you? WILDE: Oh, I should think so, certainly, if he was in my room—I always smoke them...