Underside of English Fiction

BOOK REVIEWS relationship between the play's social, feminist criticism and its conventionally romantic ending. Fitzsimmons's reading of Baker's Chains (1909) addresses the play's preoccupation with the working classes. While Baker was "no feminist visionary," her works confront the "chains" imposed on men and women by poverty, grinding labor and marriage. It is worth noting here that Diana of Dobson's and Chains have been recently republished in the volume, New Woman Plays (1991), edited by Fitzsimmons and Vivien Gardner—a welcome reprint that adds to the New Woman material slowly becoming more widely available to scholars and teachers. The New Woman and Her Sisters also contains Vivien Gardner's brief but lively introduction to the "latchkey and cigarette" New Woman and her theatrical context, an introduction that draws generously firom nineteenth-century periodical literature. Readers will, as well, find useful the chronology of social, cultural and historical events for the period 1850-1918 and the selective bibliographies of the New Woman, women and theatre, and the Victorian theatrical contexts. In his 1992 survey, "Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Theatre, 1980-1990" (Nineteenth-Century Theatre, 20 [1992]), theatre historian Michael Booth observed that "Nineteenth-century theatre criticism is still on the threshold" of feminist scholarship. The essays in The New Woman and Her Sisters point the directions for further theatre research and feminist readings of women who performed on so many different stages. Much like the arrival of the New Woman in the 1890s, these essays make clear that histories of nineteenth-century performing women have been long overdue. Patricia ΟΉβτβ Franklin & Marshall College Underside of English Fiction Peter Mendes. Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English 1800-1930: A Bibliographical Study. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1993. xviii + 479 pp. £75 $124.95 WHAT MAY BE the second oldest profession (or perhaps merely a by-product of the oldest) has been pandering almost from time immemorial to sensual fantasies as authors wove erotic themes into the fabric of their tales. For the most part, it is not these narratives that are the subject of this study, as the significant word in its title is "clandestine "—that is, privately printed books, generally described as pornographic , and issued covertly in the nineteenth and early years of the 393 ELT 37 : 3 1994 twentieth centuries with fictitious publisher's imprint, date and place of publication. The author also explains, "I mean the term 'erotic fiction' to include works ostensibly autobiographical—the blend of erotic fact and fantasy being notoriously complex and difficult to separate, if indeed it can be." These furtively produced printings are the reverse image of Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian literary rectitude and the generally moralistic fiction of those outwardly proper eras. For many years such books were beneath the counter merchandise, sold furtively to favored customers, despite several legislative efforts to eliminate the trade. The aphrodisiac tracts were generally epistolary accounts describing explicit sexual skirmishes, often with flagellation as a major focus. Repeatedly they were the object of police seizure and prosecution, but with apparently a continuing demand for when one source was eliminated another quickly took its place. Due to the surreptitious nature of the volumes and the mystification surrounding their production, they have not been well documented. Previously published surveys of these subterranean memoirs (many being studies of specialized collections) have not been specifically bibliographical and none as thorough nor wide ranging as this comprehensive and meticulously detailed examination. Professor Mendes, a University of Greenwich Senior Lecturer, acknowledges at the outset his debt to earlier studies, as well as to unpublished manuscripts, dealer's catalogues, and books in the "Private Case" at the British Library. He states that it is his intention "to chart the bibliographic history of erotic fiction in English (including translations into English) published clandestinely during the period 1885 to 1930, with a retrospective survey to 1800 appended." In this, Mendes has succeeded and rivals the detailed probing, if not the clarity and narrative flare, of John Carter and Graham Pollard in An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, which dealt with quite another group of false imprints and set the pattern for all succeeding bookish investigations of...