Contemporary Reviews on T. S. Eliot

ELT 48 : 3 2005 courage to say Ί don't care for either of you and neither of you care for me and I won't waste a day out of my precious life in grinning a company grin at you two old boobies.'" The "old" was a rather mean reference to the fact that Rossetti was forty-five and his bride was thirty-one. Rather amazingly Rossetti quoted this letter in his autobiography, omitting, according to Thirlwell, the "old boobies." In fact, J. W. Mackail had silently excised the phrase in his life of Morris, published in 1899 and so Rossetti would not have known the further dimension of Morris's insult. The last chapter, "Coda," covers rather rapidly the years from Lucy's death in 1894 to William's in 1919 although some of his activities after her death had been mentioned before. They had five children and, contrary to so many premature deaths at the time, all survived save one, Michael , who died at two. Their daughters called themselves anarchists but it is not clear what this might mean. There might have been more information about the children's subsequent careers. They were never particularly well off but they were able to lead very full lives as artists and writers. With his civil servant income, William was the sustainer of much of the Rossetti clan and he irritated his father-in-law by offering help to his distressed relations. This is a beautifully produced book on glossy paper so that the 110 black and white and 30 color illustrations are very clear. Photographs abound in the text as well as in the family tree and in small pictures of houses associated with the families distributed on a schematic map of London. The book lacks a conclusion, so there is no final assessment of William and Lucy's importance. Yet it is a splendid achievement to have written a double biography and to have been able to present such a good sense of the "dailyness" of their lives. With their considerable accomplishments , they deserved to be rescued. They are fascinating, enjoyable and interesting to read about. Yet they remain "the other Rossettis." PETER STANSKY Stanford University Contemporary Reviews on T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Jewel Spears Brooker, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xliii + 600 pp. $110.00 AS PART of Cambridge University Press's American Critical Archives series, this volume provides the most extensive compilation to date of contemporary reviews of T. S. Eliot's work. Beginning with Conrad Aiken's brief 1916 commentary on Ezra Pound's Catholic An370 BOOK REVIEWS thology, which printed five of Eliot's early poems, and ending with Bonamy Dobrée's 1959 evaluation oÃ- The Elder Statesman, this collection contains almost 600 pages of responses to Eliot's work. Reviews appear chronologically and are grouped into chapters devoted to each of the major works. Editor Jewel Spears Brooker has appended to the end of each section very helpful and often extensive bibliographies of additional reviews of the particular work in question. In the case ofThe Cock tail Party, that supplemental list references almost 150 items. For those trying to chart the critical debates initiated and framed by Eliot's poetry, prose, and drama, seeking to understand the frenzied reaction that typically greeted Eliot's writing throughout his career, or simply wanting to survey readings of individual works, this volume will now be the place to start. Given the massive amount of material gathered by Brooker, there are various ways to employ T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. If one reads chronologically, he or she will gain a sense of how reactions to Eliot's work tended to ebb and flow. For example , whenMurder in the Cathedral appeared in 1935, it was greeted with almost universal acclaim, a response that seemed due in part to critics breathing a sigh of relief after the widespread dissatisfaction with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), the controversy surrounding After Strange Gods (1934), and the ambivalence about The Rock (1934). Likewise, reading from the beginning allows us to note how specific journals treated Eliot over the course...