Authorial Alternatives

ELT 44 : 1 2001 ginia "had no systematic secondary-school preparation and would not have been able to sit for the Oxford and Cambridge examinations," arguing further that "a link with the enlightened tradition of educated women" was "precisely what Woolf rejected in her formative years." On the other hand, Rudikoff also resists the notion that Woolf s intimacy with Sackville-West can be understood in entirely sexual terms, and questions the view that Woolf suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her half brothers. However, no very clear portrait of Woolf emerges from Rudikoffs study. Perhaps this is because Woolf's attitudes toward the aristocracy "did not remain fixed throughout her life" and were "complex, ironic, and inconsistent." Nothing is simple about Woolf's life, and her romantic notion of the aristocracy is part of the complexity. But if this romance was indeed her way of imagining the great world, I would have liked to have seen a stronger connection drawn between the structure of aristocratic relationships—the fantasy Rudikoff claims Woolf created for herself— and the structure of Woolf s fiction—the fantasy she created for us. Ultimately , Woolf is interesting because of what she wrote. Although there are references to that writing in Rudikoffs study, there is little sense of what makes it important, much less of what makes it unique. Woolf, in Rudikoffs hands, remains a cypher. Frederick Kirchhoff ______________ Metropolitan State University Authorial Alternatives Bette London. Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. xii + 232 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $18.95 BETTE LONDON'S BOOK is perhaps best described as a meditation on authorship. Interrogating the concepts of the author as a single individual and literature as the product of a solitary imagination, she explores a variety of writing produced in other fashions: the Brontë "juvenilia ," the poetry of Michael Field, novels by teams such as Somerville and Ross, Mary and Jane Findlater, E. D. Gerard (Emily and Dorothea Gerard) and M. Barnard Eldershaw (Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw ), and automatic writing done by W B. Yeats and his wife Géorgie as well as by mediums such as Géraldine Cummins, Hester Dowden and Gladys Osborne Leonard. As the latter group of names would suggest, this is not really a book of literary criticism, nor is it even primarily historical or descriptive. (Fin92 book reviews ishing it, I realize that I do not have enough facts, or enough sense of the works produced by even the more conventional partnerships, to come up with a list of books I might want to read.) London's interest, rather, is in the creative process, the structures and institutions of authorship and professional recognition, the nature of collaboration (and its treatment in literary criticism), and the ways that gender, family, sexuality and exoticism intersect with what she names "alternative writing practices." The book is organized topically, for the most part; the various writers are woven loosely and thematically into London's theoretical meditation . The first chapter, however, takes its focus on the Brontë partnerships and explores issues of secrecy, identity and transgression. London is less interested in the writing itself than in the ways in which its discovery has structured narratives of the Brontes' genius and critical responses to their published work. Discussions of the juvenilia almost inevitably center on secrecy, sexuality, collective fantasy, and adolescent emotionalism—themes which resurface in the criticism of many other literary collaborators. Even more important, for the trajectory of Writing Double, is the way in which Charlotte Brontë described her compulsion to write, her feeling that the words and scenes came from some outside source, and the difficult and unpunctuated manuscripts that look so much like the automatic writing produced by spirit mediums. What does this tell us, London asks, about the creative process itself; what does it suggest that is left out of ordinary accounts of authorship? Subsequent chapters provide meditations on a variety of other topics, many of them cast as configurations which are themselves doubled and open to double meanings. The family relationship of partners who lived and wrote together (sisters, cousins, aunt-niece) simultaneously raises and (partially) defuses the issue of lesbianism. Authors...