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Reviewed by:
  • Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture
  • Lisa Hager
Jill R. Ehnenn , Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. 236 pp.

Writers of literary histories have long struggled with incorporating clearly significant biographical material without assuming an easy, one-to-one relationship between author and work. For feminist literary critics, this methodological quandary is particularly fraught as we want both to situate the writers and texts that we examine within ideologies of sex and gender and to avoid reducing these writers to categories of identity. Moreover, when assessing queer writers, this question takes on added urgency, because highlighting an author's non-normative sexuality can potentially lead to an ahistorical vision of sexual identity and authorship that leaves out the dynamic historical context of both categories. Jill R. Ehnenn's Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture is a welcome addition to this conversation. It focuses on the conditions and consequences of literary production amongst four collaborative pairs of late-Victorian women writers: Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper); Somerville and Ross (Edith Sommerville and Violet Martin, AKA Martin Ross); Vernon Lee and Clementia "Kit" Anstruther-Thompson; and Elizabeth Robbins and Florence Bell.

Ehnenn has chosen these particular pairs of women because their collaborations and resultant texts not only reveal the erotic and queer authorial economies at work in 1890s literary partnerships between women but also yield a more nuanced view of England at the turn of the century. As she establishes in her introduction, fittingly titled "Coming Together," Ehnenn's look at these four dyads seeks to intervene in a variety of literary and historical scholarly discourses, including fin-de-siècle studies, feminist recovery work, and queer literary studies. Consequently, the central goals of the book are twofold: to reclaim the "life and work of late-Victorian women, who although greatly respected in their day, have since been relegated to the distant margins of literary study," and to situate this project "with its context in LGBT/queer studies and postmodern academia" even as the subjects are contextualized within late-Victorian history [End Page 421] (24). In approaching the twin goals of reclamation and double contextualization, Ehnenn makes the compelling argument that the homosocial textual production that characterizes women's literary collaboration in this period provides an entry point into understanding how these women challenged the conventional idea of the author, both in their writing processes and, thematically, in the texts they produced. It is through looking at how these authors described their work practices and how they coded desire in their literary texts that we can see how they mobilized a queer performative citationality, a way of cultural referencing in which dominant ideologies of sex and gender are both mobilized and unsettled.

For Ehnenn, central to tracing the contours of this literary history are the ways in which these four pairs of late-Victorian literary women subvert conventional ideals of authorship, especially the Romantic ideal of the author as a solitary male genius. In a delicate mix of biography and literature, on the basis of letters and diaries, she argues that each of these dyads constructs its literary partnership in terms of a woman-centered, reciprocal, and fulfilling relationship in which both participants move between positions of creator and audience, so that the work of one constantly unfolds into the other, molding a collaborative literary and aesthetic identity. Their collaborations resist attempts to codify authority within the partnership by utilizing "metaphors of boundlessness," which make identifying who wrote/thought of what nearly impossible (34). Exemplifying this dynamic in the case of Michael Field's work, we have two women who are speaking as one male voice in order to claim a space for the work of their homoerotic collaboration.

The first chapter, "The 'art and mystery of collaboration': Authorial Economies, Queer Pleasures," provides the theoretical foundation for the book and largely concerns itself with laying out a methodology for examining the impact of women's collaborative practices on the literature they wrote. Here and throughout the book, Ehnenn compellingly argues that each of the four pairs of authors is "strikingly performative" in its collaborations and...

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