May Laffan Hartley

BOOK REVIEWS tualizes the novel so that it more forcefully champions beauty rather than ethics as the principal concern of art, he also introduces features that draw the novel back into the ambit of the moralistic realist tradition . These include its broader social settings and the creation of the vengeful James Vane. As the third volume in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde this handsome edition of Wilde's longest prose narrative maintains the high editorial standards that scholars and researchers have come to expect in the series. The bibliographical apparatus is exemplary. The introduction and textual commentary provide a solid review of Wilde's extensive intellectual source materials as well as describing relevant cultural contexts. Bristow's account of Wilde's "rewriting" of Pater crisply summarizes current work in the field and gives chapter and verse for specific allusions. The commentary also clarifies Wilde's departures from as well as indebtedness to Huysmans's A Rebours (Dorian's fascination with embroidery rather than sex produces a distinctively British inflection of European Décadence). Verbal echoes and Wilde's "self-quotations " are identified; and the volume explicates a wealth of topical and literary references including historical events, specific locations, idiomatic expressions, and even the significance of the guinea for the pricing of Victorian luxury commodities. These notes will enable all students of the period to get a firmer grip on the unspoken assumptions and knowledges of Wilde's first readers, including their awareness of homoerotic codes, hints and allusions. The Picture of Dorian Gray will continue to tantalize and divide scholars and critics, but this definitive edition of the novel richly extends understanding of its place within fin-de-siècle literary production. MAUREEN MORAN __________________ Brunei University May Laffan Hartley Helena Kelleher Kahn. Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland's Political and Religious Controversies in the Fiction of May Laffan Hartley. Greensboro: ELT Press, 2005. ix + 276 pp. Original Paperback $40.00 UNTIL RECENTLY I had never heard of May Laffan Hartley. Having now read one of her novels (Hogan MP, available as an e-book on the ELT Press website) and Helena Kelleher Kahn's erudite study of Laffan Hartley's works, I find I've been provided the "missing dimension to the Irish world of Shaw and Joyce" Kahn predicted. Laffan's novels, written in the 1870s and 1880s, have been neglected for the very good reason that they have been out of print since the early twen329 ELT 49 : 3 2006 tieth century. Kahn believes the timing of Laffan's publications, just before a literary revival valuing and promoting plays and poems over novels, may account for their "swift descent into obscurity." When Kahn learned of this forgotten novelist from a family connection, she proceeded to assemble as much of Laffan's history and work as she could find. The result is an insightful and informative analysis of a talented woman writer's version of Victorian Ireland, an interpretation of the era's mores yet to be fully examined. As Kahn's title suggests, Laffan's preoccupation with the religious backgrounds of her characters replicates an anxiety in Irish culture at large that effected political controversy and momentous change in the late nineteenth century. Unlike her contemporaries or immediate successors, however, Laffan wrote from the position of a Catholic convent school-educated woman, the product of a religiously mixed marriage. Her father, an upwardly aspiring middle-class Catholic had married into a wealthy Church of Ireland family. Laffan also had firsthand knowledge of Ireland's marginal populations by way of both her Norman Irish Catholic peasant ancestry, and her volunteer work with Dublin's poor. Her hybridity apparently endowed Laffan with a sort of cultural multiple vision as well as a relatively even hand when it came to depicting the complex interrelationships among religion, class, and power in her milieu. While the typical novel set in nineteenth-century Ireland tends to focus either on the poor or the landed gentry, Laffan's works incorporate both, while also emphasizing the struggles of the middle class. Among the most pressing issues for all classes was education . Though Laffan's interest in women's education constitutes for Kahn "almost an obsession...