Ann Taylor Gilbert's Album ed. by Christina Duff Stewart (review)

424 LEITERS IN CANADA 1979 both author and heroines. In Sense and Sensibility, 'Marianne is a classic case of love melancholy' (p 19), and in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth is struck by Darcy's portrait at Pemberley, 'Burton would have signed her up for a course of emergency treatment at once' (p 25). Juliet McMaster is also particularly effective in the chapter on 'Love and Pedagogy,' in which she shows how the role of the teacher in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice - indeed in all the novels - merges with, is often indistinguishable from, that oflover. And of course it is a reciprocal relationship: Fanny teaches Edmund more important truths than he learns from her, and Elizabeth Bennet learns most when she has been most schoolmarmish with Darcy. In sum, this is a book of real distinction, a pleasure to read for itself and one which alllovers ofJane Austen should know. I believe it to be among the half-dozen best critical works on her novels. Would that it were longer - and that Juliet McMaster would expand this modest beginning to a work dealing as perspicaciously and engagingly with other central issues in Jane Austen as she has dealt here with 'ane Austen on Love. (G.E. BENTLEY, JR) Christina Duff Stewart, editor. Ann Taylor Gilbert's Album Garland Publishing 1978. xxxiv, 679, illus, and facsimiles. $65.00 The Taylors of Ongar in Essex were an English, nonconformist family of minor brilliance in several fields. Ann (1782-1866), later Mrs Gilbert, was only one of several children to make a literary mark on the nineteenth century. Daughter of an engraver who claimed Milton among his ancestors , Ann Taylor appears to have early found a perpetual amusement in writing, despite her mother's view that 'lady authors would be better employed in mending the family stockings: She had a talent for verSifying , children's rhymes, and hymns, which never left her; and Christina Duff Stewart repeats the claim that Ann Taylor Gilbert wrote the hymn that was most widely known and widely quoted in the century. Author or major contributor to at least a dozen works published in her lifetime, Mrs Gilbert's books are little known and hard to find in Canada today. In an environment that invites superficial comparison with the young Brontes in precociousness, or even with those Bloomsbury belles the Stephens in intelligence, the Album brings together the signed work of not only the Taylors' and her husband's circles but also of friends and acquaintances from beyond the provincial and even religious boundaries of Ann Taylor Gilbert's world. The Album presents polite professions of friendship and many a religious effusion, often in metrical composition but sometimes in prose; some of the inscriptions are borrowed, snippets of Cowper or Conder HUMANITIES 425 along with biblical quotations, but a number have the charm of originality . Then there are a number of sketches of family homes or familiar scenes, mostly from East Anglia but others from Mrs Gilbert's years in Yorkshire. Some of the pages serve as a memorial programme for family reunions, a baptism, a wedding, or a funeral. Indeed, several dozen pages at the end of the album are entered long after Mrs Gilbert's death in 1866; these include modem photographs of Taylor houses and more recent family history. Understandably the quality of such diverse ephemera is variable. Too many of the pages presented have little but earnestness and good intentions to recommend them. But then album verse is synonymous with facile penmanship. The majority of the verses are wistful and sentimental , as their titles may suggest: 'To an Old Chimney seen from My Garden' (Josiah Gilbert); 'On the Death of a Wasp' (Ann Taylor); 'Farewell to Sudbury' (Ann Taylor Gilbert). Others are curios of vanished taste, and perhaps a few have vitality, such as the witty parody 'My Elbow' (Jefferys Taylor) or the delicate elegy by Mrs Gilbert's husband on their eight-year-old son, 'I loved thee, Edward.' The price of this tome is very high, but Stewart appears to have her priorities right. Reproducing most of the five-hundred-odd pages of the album is expensive, and...