Assessing the Cambridge Lawrence Edition

ELT 40:1 1997 inside it. The danger is that we'll conclude, "Roman-fleuve or écriture féminine, it's all the same: a long narrative, divided by gaps, without a solid ending." Felber's goal, of course, is to inspire readers with the limitless meanings and contexts suggested by these long, divided, inconclusive narratives, not to confront them with a series of flat identities. Fortunately, Felber flattens rarely and inspires regularly. She's at her best when she indulges in her smart readings of individual roman-fleuves . By concentrating on relationships between volumes in each series, she succeeds where past critics have failed; problems that exist when individual volumes are read in isolation evaporate once they are read as part of an extended whole. ELT readers should be delighted by the imaginative and accurate readings of Pilgrimage (Felber is especially good on the vexed question of Miriam Henderson's sexuality), though her scrupulous attention to detail extends equally to her discussion of the Palliser series as a "proto-" roman-fleuve and the Dance series as a "nostalgic" version of the form. It is not surprising that Felber should come to imagine us reading her book much the same way she teaches us to read the roman-fleuve; she bids us to "carefully peruse each of the separate parts as they contribute to a cumulative understanding." It might have helped readers if those parts were not quite so separate, if Felber's recommended strategy for attaining that cumulative understanding relied on more than assurances that the chapters on each of the figures are "parallel and linked." It is fair for readers who have been swimming through significant portions of the Palliser novels, Pilgrimage, and A Dance to the Music of Time to request a bit more guidance about the ways in which differences between readings of the three novels (specific breaks in the "parallels," significant cracks in the "links") impact understandings of the function and history of narrative genres. Other, better rested readers will simply put to use the authoritative scholarship of Gender and Genre while wondering whether the twenty-first century will provide the leisure time necessary to become the ideal reader Trollope, Richardson, and Powell desired and that Felber has, miraculously, proven herself to be. Kristin Bluemel _______________ Monmouth University Assessing the Cambridge Lawrence Edition Charles L. Ross and Dennis Jackson, eds. Editing D. H. Lawrence: New Versions of a Modern Author. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. vii + 258 pp. $47.50 98 BOOK REVIEWS EDITING D. H. LAWRENCE is a collection of thirteen essays by eleven authors, most of whom have been involved in editions of Lawrence's works, notably the Cambridge University Press (CUP) edition . And it is this edition that is discussed in all the contributions. The book's aim is to "link textual criticism and editing to theory," as Charles L. Ross puts it in his succinct introduction. Textual critics and editors would do well to respond "to the challenges of structuralist and poststructuralist theory." (Let it be said at once that not all of the contributors meet the challenge, although such theories are never far from what they have to say.) Conversely, literary theorists are asked to discard their habitual disregard of textual and bibliographical evidence. The book is unique in that it includes its own assessment by way of an eighteen-page review of its major articles, written by William E. Cain. Together with a very helpful report on the reception of the Cambridge edition and an annotated bibliography, both by Dennis Jackson, this review provides an entry into the problems of, and much necessary background information about, the quarrels and unresolved issues besetting the whole project. No one seems to doubt the necessity of undertaking such an edition and many reviewers have praised it, but the rigorously eclectic and often poorly argued editorial policies of the board of editors and of the volume editors come in for some severe criticism. Apparently, there is a long-standing quarrel, perhaps even animosity, between some of the Cambridge editors and other textual scholars who have not been involved in the project (notably Charles L. Ross); and even some volume editors (e...