Women, Genre and Circumstance: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize by Margaret Atack et al. (review)

As a teacher, scholar, feminist, and member of the Higher Education community, national and international, Elizabeth Fallaize was someone who made a difference. There are numerous colleagues in and beyond French studies — I count myself among them — whose careers and lives have benefited enormously from the intellectual and personal generosity Elizabeth unfailingly brought to her engagements with others. Her untimely death robbed us of someone who was a leader in her field, a mentor and inspiration to many, and, no less importantly, a delightful friend. The task of putting together a collection of essays written in memory of Elizabeth, assembled as an expression of mourning, respect, and recognition, will have been a sad one: equally, it is a task that the volume’s editors have discharged with elegance and skill. Narratives of scholarly homage must by definition operate in dialogue with the scholarship of the person they commemorate, and the essays of this collection make a fine job of doing so. Divided into three sections — ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, ‘The Short Story’, and ‘Women and Circumstance’ — and prefaced both by a general Introduction and by Margaret Atack’s tribute piece ‘Elizabeth Fallaize: French Scholar’, the volume’s chapters effect a series of intellectual interventions inspired by and explicitly engaged with Elizabeth’s own work. These chapters, concerned with key preoccupations of her scholarly and critical œuvre and written by colleagues who worked closely with Elizabeth in various contexts, are followed by a Coda, ‘Women’s Time: Simone de Beauvoir and the Independent Woman’, in which we hear Elizabeth’s own voice: a voice never less than incisive, intuitive, and intellectually persuasive. The essays that constitute Women, Genre and Circumstance expand on papers given at the academic tribute to Elizabeth that took place in London in October 2010. Written by Michèle Le Dœuff, Suzanne Dow^†, Ursula Tidd, Diana Knight, Colin Davis, Alison Finch, Judith Still, Gill Rye, and Diana Holmes, they are accompanied by an interrogation of Beauvoir’s ‘La Femme rompue’ first given by Toril Moi as the memorial lecture for Elizabeth in Oxford in 2011. As the volume’s Introduction makes clear, these essays engage with core facets of Elizabeth’s own intellectual agenda — women’s writing; feminist politics and practice; matters of gender and genre — in order to build on critical trajectories she made very much her own. They offer a powerful and moving reminder of the lineaments and achievements of her scholarly work. Equally, as critical explorations of a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative artefacts and practices, they are a pleasure to read, combining to create a collection that is an academic delight and would certainly have delighted the woman to whom it is dedicated. Elizabeth Fallaize held a very special place in the field of French studies. Women, Genre and Circumstance is a volume that articulates that place most fittingly, with intellectual regard and profound affection.