The Spanish World

Book Reviews239 Margaret George. Women in the First Capitalist Society: Experiences in Seventeenth-Century England. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1988. 261 p. Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce. Personal Writings by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. 294 p. A history of those intimate surveys of daily life, the diaries, is the subject of Centuries ofFemale Days. Reviewing nearly one hundred women's private accounts from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, Harriet Blodgett offers a chance for comparison of attitudes toward marriage, motherhood, and work. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women include Diana Astry, Anne Clifford, Mary Clavering Cowper, Elizabeth Freke, Margaret Hoby, Katherine Howard, and Isabella Twysden. Anne Clifford's diary entries from 1676, not included in Sackville-West's The Diary ofAnne Clifford, are reprinted. With an eye turned to the newly emerging bourgeoisie, Margaret George's Women in the First Capitalist Society examines seventeenth-century Englishwomen through their personal literature. The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson and the Catholic Elizabeth Cellier along with Elizabeth Freke, Alice Thornton, and Brilliana Harley all have self-contained chapters drawn from information in their own diaries, letters, and autobiographies. Additional sections discuss radical Protestantism and attitudes toward sex. Personal Writings by Women to 1900, compiled by Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce, is a bibliography recording the private world—letters, diaries, autobiographies , and some advice books such as The Countess ofLincoln's Nursery (1622). To comment on the seventeenth-century entries only: the greatest problem I find with this project is the cut-offdate, for no books appearing after 1900 are included. This eliminates such publications as the diaries ofAnne Clifford (1923) and Margaret Hoby (1930), along with the letters of Katherine Paston (1941), Dorothy Wadham (1904), Maria van Rensselaer (1935), and many others. A number of corrupt texts which were published before 1900 have been superseded by twentieth-century editions; however, the post-1900 versions are not listed. Personal Writings cites the earlier memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett (1875), and Ann, Lady Fanshaw (1829), but excludes the excellent John Loftis edition of these two autobiographies (1979). And, some works published before 1900 are missing, for example the letters of Margaret and John Winthrop (1893) and of Dorothy, Countess of Sunderland (1819 and 1843). Personal Writings is worth taking the time to check, but should not be considered the place for a full stop. THE SPANISH WORLD Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 450 p. Octavio Paz. Sor Juana or, The Traps ofFaith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 547 p. 240Rocky Mountain Review A Sor Juana Anthology, translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 248 p. "In their convents, women both withdrew from society and triumphed over it," write Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau in Untold Sisters. Spanish Sisters, from Old and New Spain in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, it now turns out, left behind extensive archival sources—poems, autobiographies, letters . Here is to be found biographical data, bilingual selections of literature, a rich gallery of pictures including self-portraits, and all assembled to uncover an eloquent voice in a heretofore unknown literature. Only two of these religious women are well known, Saint Teresa and Juana de la Cruz. We learn of others in convents from Spain to Peru and Mexico. Untold Sisters contains an excellent bibliography of the seventeenth-century Spanish world. It is somehow fitting that Mexico's leading twentieth-century scholar should write a biography of Mexico's great seventeenth-century intellectual. Octavio Paz, with his critically acclaimed Sor Juana, has finally opened the life of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz to the English world. As linguist, scientist, playwright, feminist, and leading baroque poet, the nun ofMexico was the only Renaissance intellectual of the Americas in her century. As Paz notes, Sor Juana was "a creature of words who lived for and because of the word" (197). A superb companion to the Paz biography is A Sor Juana Anthology, a bilingual selection ofpoetry, including the classic "First Dream," with excellent translations by Alan S. Trueblood. As noted in the introduction...