Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 by Nina Baym (review)

64ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW graduate students in The Women's Room, striving to rise but still mired in history. CONSTANCE M. PLATT, University of Denver Nina Baym. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. 320 p. Probably no other group of writers has been as thoroughly condemned and as little read in recent years as the women who cornered the novel market for half the nineteenth century. Those critics who have bothered to consider them at all have tended to treat individual books as peculiar demonstrations of capricious feminist taste rather than as serious literary efforts. Certainly, an Nina Baym is careful to point out, the women who wrote the works did not believe that they were producing great art so much as assiduously pursuing one of the few trades for women that was both respectable and lucrative — a cottage industry of the highest order. But the writers took their subject matter seriously and explored their single theme and its multiple variations with specific ends in mind; Baym respects both her subjects and their goals — the development of feminine independence, the assertion of a feminine ego, the understanding of female worth. She makes no excuses for the distressingly similar plots that emerge from a single story of a beleaguered young woman — orphaned, widowed, somehow deserted — struggling in a world in which the abusers of power try unsuccessfully to prevent her from achieving her own happiness. The repeated message of these openly, vigorously didactic works is that there is help for the helpless in feminine determination in spite of the machinations of unfriendly aunts, that happiness may be discovered in other havens than in marriage, and that feminine self-sufficiency is a finer goal than wealth. Heroines in these novels rescue themselves from their problems, developing strength and sense from their woes; they seem such different creatures from those heroines of all the ages, those Eves of male novelists of the period that a reader may wonder if their creators inhabited the same nineteenth-century America. Women's Fiction is far more than a guide to novels customarily dismissed : it is both a corrective to those who condemn and an illumination to those who are curious about the works of women who wrote for and about women. Tracing the genre to the comedy of manners, and particularly to Maria Edgeworth, Baym chronicles the development through such writers as the Warner sisters, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Caroline Hentz, Maria Cummins , Marian Harland, and many more, considering as well important women like Harriet Beecher Stowe who chose not to follow the formula and "Fanny Fern" who deviated from it in important ways. An opening chapter on form and ideology directs the sensible readings of dozens of books, and an extremely helpful bibliographical note adds value to the work. Baym resists making claims for active, conscious feminism in the BOOK REVIEWS65 works, but she is willing to assert that "the novels may have been both a sign of change and a contribution to it." Perhaps her guide is a similar signal and contribution. ANNE HOWARD, University of Nevada, Reno Javier L. Collazo. English-Spanish, Spanish-English Encyclopedic Dictionary of Technical Terms. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1980. 3v. It would be difficult to be too enthusiastic about this publication. Lexicographic material concerning technical and scientific vocabulary has been scant in Spanish and the tremendous, almost daily, increase in concepts and their matching terms has left standard works like Duden por la imagen far behind; the dictionary of the Real Academia Española is hopeless in this regard. Divided over questions of linguistic "purity," unwilling to accept some of the structural configurations of technical terms, frustrated by the wide variety of loan translation forms for a single concept in the major, leading dialects of Spain, Argentina, and Mexico, and discouraged by the impossibility of being current, most compilers have simply avoided the issue of technical language. Although partial lists for certain areas have existed, they have not always been readily available. Drawing on these lists and — more important — on a wide array of specialized sources, Collazo has provided as...