Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist (review)

The first published volume to examine critically the texts of an unusually prolific writer, Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist focuses on a southern modernist who attained wide recognition in the 1920s-30s for her experimental prose, daring subject matter, and unconventional life. The thirteen essays in this volume constitute a significant exploration of the multiple genres in which Scott worked—no simple task, since Scott's oeuvre includes eleven novels, two memoirs, two volumes of poetry, and numerous plays, short stories, and works of nonfiction prose. Building upon Mary Wheeling White's recent study of Scott's life (Fighting the Current: The Life and Work of Evelyn Scott; Louisiana State University Press, 1998), the essays present new perspectives and provide original material for scholars of Scott, southern women writers, and literary modernism. Not surprisingly, they also implicitly raise provocative questions about the historical, political, and cultural processes that shape literary reputations and that have, with few exceptions, worked to marginalize women writers—especially, perhaps, southern women writers.

Ostensibly organized by genre ("Memoirs," "Novels," "Works in Other Genres"), the essays are more ambitious than these section headings suggest. Indeed, one of the volume's distinctive features is that the contributors not only offer readings of Scott's work, but also situate Scott in relation to other modernist writers, ideologies of gender and race, southern fictions and ideologies, and generic conventions. The first section ("Memoirs") is the most cohesive. It focuses on Scott's two autobiographical fictions, Escapade and Background in Tennessee, and provides an excellent introduction to key elements of Scott's life as well as to central themes in her work. The four essays illuminate the overlapping dimensions of Scott's autobiographical fictions—as modernist experimentation, women's autobiography, southern literature, and/or travel writing. Tim Edwards considers Scott's representations of distinctively female experience; Janis Stout compares Scott's representations of racialized others to Katherine Anne Porter's; Paul Jones examines Scott's conflicted response to motherhood; and Martha Cook explores Scott's ambivalence toward ideals of southern womanhood.

The second section considers Scott's novels in relation to her literary contemporaries, dominant social ideologies, and historical contexts. Marilyn Elkins assesses Scott's influence on Kay Boyle; Steven Ryan focuses on Scott's connections with Floyd Dell and Waldo Frank; Lucinda MacKethan places The Wave within the context of better-known Civil War fictions; Karen Overbye explores Scott's representation of the tragic mulatto; and Tim Edwards examines the relationship between Scott's unpublished "Before Cock Crow" and Faulkner's A Fable, both of which recast the passion of Christ. The third and final section ("Works in Other Genres") may be less cohesive, yet it nevertheless makes an equally significant contribution. It includes the first published critical readings of Scott's poetry and drama (by Caroline Maun and Mary E. Papke, respectively), as well as annotations of Scott's short fiction (compiled by Mary Wheeling) and nonfiction prose (Will Brantley).

Collectively, then, these essays offer an excellent introduction to Scott's work and provide a valuable resource for scholars. The quality of the essays is consistently high, though some are more theoretically or historically informed than others. Of course, any study that breaks new ground necessarily and simultaneously calls attention to the need for additional work, and Evelyn Scott is no exception: as it maps new territory it highlights the need for more critical assessment, for even more detailed analyses of Scott's innovative representations and use of language in individual works, for even wider comparisons with southern, modernist, and feminist writers, and—eventually—for a careful reconsideration of the politics of literary reputation from the new perspectives that the details of Scott's life and work will afford.

If the dominant critical paradigms of the past have relegated Evelyn Scott to marginal status, it remains to be seen whether new and emerging paradigms will place her...