Portrait of a Critic

ELT 39:1 1996 achievement in which a mans life is often conceived does a real disservice to the complexity of the network of sometimes conflicting goals to which a womans life may tend." Jay chooses instead to shine a spotlight on different portions of the tangled web, but does little to straighten out the strands or give the web as a whole some sort of meaning. Like so many of Oliphants novels, Jay denies us closure. Jay is strongest when describing the way that Oliphant thought of her own autobiography and came to shape it: The retrospective mode of autobiography afforded her the opportunity to reflect upon the arbitrary way in which choices, subsequently elevated to the status of decisions, were actually made. Even the chronological breaks in composition were brought into service to demonstrate the intensity of the artists desire to provide the continuous thread of meaning waging a constant war with lifes abrupt discontinuities." In her autobiography as well as in her fiction, Oliphant constantly stresses the ways in which "life fails to conform to the conventional divisions of tragedy or comedy." Even readers familiar with Oliphants work may be disconcerted by the way minute aspects of long and multi-faceted works are related to individual themes, without introduction or contextualization. Each chapter is devoted to a different thesis, such as Oliphants understanding of a womans sphere, a womans place in a mans world, religion, and professional life. This thematic arrangement means that works from widely different periods are cited (often only by footnote) to support a chapters thesis. Nevertheless, this is the most complete and thorough critical biography to date, providing invaluable coverage and analysis of numerous aspects of Oliphants life and work. Anyone interested in Victorian women wül find hundreds of important insights into the life and thought of perhaps the most representative Victorian woman author, including her views on women, the famüy, religion, her profession , her fellow Victorians, her culture, and her age. Barbara Thaden University of North Carolina, Greensboro Portrait of a Critic Richard Hauer Costa. An Appointment with Somerset Maugham and Other Literary Encounters. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994. xvi + 227pp. Cloth $35.00 Paper $15.95 AN APPOINTMENT with Somerset Maugham and Other Literary Encounters is Richard Hauer Costa's combination of selected critical 134 BOOK REVIEWS commentaries and his autobiographical musings about his relationships to that material. The volume is divided into a preface, four sections, an afterword, endnotes, and an index. In his preface, Costa notes that the book "interweaves memoir and scholarship" and claims that it is "not a collection of previously published or presented essays," though he notes that seven of the fifteen formal pieces have appeared in journals and that two were related to material presented at international symposiums on Wells and Joyce. Part One, The Troubling Case of Somerset Maugham," is comprised of a prologue ("Abiding Gods") and three chapters on Maugham ("Somerset Maugham and the Driffield Position," "Maugham's *Partial Self: The "Unexpected View,'" and The Wages of Notoriety—An Update"). In the prologue, Costa sets the tone for what is to follow: he begins by talking about "the two story collections that would change my life"— Tellers of Tales, which was edited by Maugham and eventually led to the critic's reading Of Human Bondage, and The Famous Short Stories of HG. Wells, which included The Time Machine. Costa is a man of books, and An Appointment with Somerset Maugham is about his life, first as a reader of books and then as an interpreter of books—two inseparable topics in his opinion. That books are his paramount interest is demonstrated by his confession that the most memorable day of his life was neither the day of his marriage nor the day that his son was born but rather Labor Day, 1959, when "Shortly before eleven on Tuesday, September 8, on the balcony of his vüla called La Mauresque, overlooking the Mediterranean at St. Jean—Cap Ferrât in the south of France, I met Somerset Maugham." He admits that this sounds pretentious , yet he goes on to explain that the "world of books surpasses any other." The three...