The New Woman and Her Sisters

ELT 37:3 1994 O'Connor's misogynistic reflection of 1968, John Middleton Mirny's husbandly musings, Antony Alpers detailed 1980 revision, and Claire Hanson's frank advocacy of Mansfield's "own complex position of authority in language." This thorough examination of Mansfield's legacy, in words of others seeking to define, contain, or empower Mansfield, adds much to the field of Mansfield critical awareness. Critical Essays is a remarkable scholarly work, bringing together many readings, new and old, to add much to the remarkably sparse Mansfield critical canon. For any scholar working on Katherine Mansfield , it is an essential read. Morrow's Katherine Mansfield's Fiction will aide new students to gain an understanding of her work, but it has little to add critically to the study of the woman Bridget Orr calls "the only peacock in the New Zealand literary garden." Deborah Martinson Occidental College The New Woman and Her Sisters Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford, eds. The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850-1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. xxi + 238 pp. Cloth $39.50 Paper $14.95 IN JUST THE PAST few years, the social and literary history of the New Woman of the 1890s has been the subject of several engaging and important studies. Works like Ann Ardis's New Woman, New Novels (1990), Ruth Brandon's The New Women and the OldMen (1990), Sheila Stowell's A Stage of Their Own (1991), and Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy (1991) have heightened our critical awareness of that transgressive , late-century female being. Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford 's splendid collection of essays, The New Woman and Her Sisters, extends the category of New Woman to include all manner of her performing sisters, and it adds several new chapters to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century history of British and American theatre. The genesis of this collection was a conference sponsored by the Manchester University Drama Department, and as the editors note, "Whilst the conference had at its centre the original idea of the so-called New Woman and the ways in which she had been depicted on the stage, most of the contributors found much wider evidence of subversion of the female norm in diverse areas of nineteenth-century theatrical activity." Although readers expecting a more narrowly defined 1890s New Woman might be frustrated by this expansiveness, the editorial decision to 390 BOOK REVIEWS construe the New Woman more broadly effectively yields a diversity of contexts out of which the New Woman emerged. The subjects treated in individual essays range quite widely, and a summary of the volume's organization and titles illustrates its critical diversity and suggests some of the unexpected places that the authors have located the sisters of the New Woman. The volume is divided into seven parts, each with two essays. Part I, "Woman Defined," includes Jill Davis's essay on Shaw, the new drama and the ways in which the New Woman was made "to speak Tier master's voice,'" as well as an essay by Lesley Ferris on the creation of images of the "golden girl" of the West in American theater. Part II, "Women Dressing as Men," offers "Princess Hamlet" and J. S. Bratton's essay on cross-dressing by women on the late nineteenth-century stage. In "Women Singing," we read about literary images of the prima donna (Susan Rutherford) and about "Yvette Guillbert: La Femme Moderne on the British Stage" (Géraldine Harris). "Female Daredevils" (Helen Day) and the adventuress figure in Lady Audley's Secret (Zoë Aldrich) are considered as "Venturesome Women." The final sections of the volume—"Women Writing Women" and "Women in Control"—examine the work of women dramatists and women managers of theatres and theatrical groups. While most of the pairings of essays are effective and at times provocative, a couple are less than successful. The weaknesses of the somewhat tepid and critically unfocused essay on female Hamlets are unfortunately highlighted when one moves to J. S. Bratton's enormously informed discussion of cross-dressing women in turn-of-the-century music halls and their relation to New Woman ideals. The discussion, in "Venturesome Women," of...