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- BOOK REVIEWS Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and The Female Voice. Edited by Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 353 pp. Cloth $39.95. In a review of In Our Time, D.H. Lawrence wrote of Hemingway's unusual collection: "In Our Time calls itself a book of stories, but it isn't that. It is a series of sketches from a man's life, and makes a fragmentary novel" (quoted in Clifford 12). The book mirrors, in short, uncertainty of form. That might be true, in the best sense, of Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. It's certainly a volume of collected criticism— nothing new in that—but it's also a gathering of female voices, seventeen ways of talking about the women in Hemingway's texts and in his life. Perhaps because the critical voices are all female, the resulting collection seems more conversational than confrontational. The intersecting and highly individual approaches come together in a colloquy of readings which, to use the editors' words, "release[s]" Hemingway's textual and actual women from "decades of male-imposed stereotypes" (xiii). Certainly not every essay charts new turf. Many do. But taken together, these essays comprise a seminal book that should be shelved beside Philip Young and Carlos Baker, nudging neither aside, but demonstrating with conviction that there is more to Hemingway than wounded men and code heroes. If, in 1992, Kelli A. Larson could announce a kind of "Hemingway Renaissance," with scholars "breathing new life into texts once thought critically eviscerated" (21), this collection represents the best ofthat renaissance spirit of rebirth. The impetus behind this project was to bring together in one volume criticism by prominent female Hemingway scholars. As editors Lawrence Broer and Gloria Holland note, many of these scholars were drawn to the writer by the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden (1986), the novel that revealed a writer "whose androgynous impulses not only contradict the machismo Hemingway of myth but also whose complex female protagonists and problematic treatment of gender relationships demand a réévaluation of Hemingway's entire literary output" (ix-x). Fresh perspecHiF . HIMINCIWAY Rtvitw, voi. 22, no. 2. SPRiNO 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 92 ¦ THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW tives on gender issues in his work account for about two-thirds of the essays, and others are personal and biographical readings. The range appeals; essayists were "invited to design their own topics" and that freedom of choice generated an intriguing variety of approaches, from the restorative textual work of,Rose Marie Burwell, who looks at omitted sections of Islands in the Stream, to Ann Putnam's splendid examination of a feminine landscape in "Big Two Hearted River." The first essay, by Linda Patterson Miller, sets a paradigm for this book in that her surprisingly personal approach unsettles the reader's expectation of what a scholarly collection is all about. "In Love with Papa" tells about her passion for all things Ernest: "I little imagined two decades ago how much Ernest Hemingway would take over my life" is the opening sentence of this collection (3). Indeed, when we begin scholarly careers, how many of us know how fully an author's psyche can become our own, so that when a roving reporter asks something impossible like, "What would Hemingway think of this pending war" you almost find yourself responding to the question. It's good to be reminded at the beginning of this particular book how completely that identification can happen to a female scholar writing about a male writer. The ensuing love affair, born out of respect and great dialogue, nurtured even in the face of unpleasantries and outright betrayal, endures, in Miller's case for nearly a quarter of a century , longer4han most marriages. In her view, Hemingway drew "sketchy" female characters because "he discovered them more fully by giving them little to say. His women embody the 7/8 of the iceberg that is down under..."(6). Surfacing is a good metaphor to use in describing,all these critics' textual work: they stand on the precipice of...

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