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342 W.J. KEITH presented by her book does not support this claim. There are many important discoveries made in Romanticism and Gender, and Mellor has made a solid contribution to the scholarship of this period's feminine voices, but her theoretical model raises far more questions than it can answer. Can this period's feminine perspective be studied and appreciated without the antagonistic generalizations that permeate this work? Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats were not feminists - nor would they have made very good social workers - and they are easy targets when judged in the arena of feminist politics. Poets, they were. Self-absorbed? Absolutely. 'Writing and What Goes On There': The Laurence-Purdy Letters W.J. KEITH John Lennox, editor. Margaret Laurence - Ai Purdy: A Friendship in Letters Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1993. xl, 380. $39.99 A correspondence between one of Canada's most respected - and best-loved novelists and one of the cOWltry'S finest contemporary poets: such a meeting of creative minds is intriguing, to say the least, and the prospects decidedly promising. Indeed, within the exchange of letters itself Margaret Laurence, originally uneasy about AI Purdy's preserving of her letters (but then admitting that she had always kept his!), considers their potential importance: 'Strikes me now that this correspondence might possibly make interesting reading someday when we are dead, for what the letters say about writing and what goes on there.' Now, six years after Laurence's own death but with Purdy very much alive, the correspondence has been made available. And it does 'make interesting reading,' though not, perhaps, quite in the way that Laurence envisaged. I had better say immediately that, while reading the book, I was torn between emotional response and intellectual irritation. Yes, it is linteresting' as extended, uninhibited conversation between two accomplished creative writers; on the other hand, I learnt little about the two of them that I didn't know before, and part of what I learnt was disillusioning. First, however, some facts about this edition. McClelland and Stewart, the regular publishers of both Laurence and Purdy, have produced the book in an attractive form (when did I last encounter a secular book with a bound-in cloth bookmark?). Jt is clearly directed not so much towards scholars and researchers (the normal target of literary correspondence) as towards a more general readership. To be sure, the book is edited by John Lennox,.a professor of English at York University (where the correspondence is now housed), with devotion and care, and in accordance with scholarly editorial principles, but the annotations are for the most part confined to basic information. Moreover, this is a selection of less than half of the 'approximately 300 letters' that the two writers exchanged, and we are given no dear indication of what was omitted and why. One can THE LAURENCE-PURDY LEITERS 343 reasonably assume that letters about 'writing and what goes on there' have been favoured, but the specialist scholar is likely to be uneasy about possibly revealing letters that have been left out - all the more so, since it is possible to disagree with Lennox about the significance of those letters that have been printed. Personally, while expressing genuine gratitude for his labours in making this material available, I would question Lennox's interpretation of the interest of this correspondence on two counts. First, I wonder whether he is altogether accurate about the style and tone of the letters. He argues at one point that Purdy'S voice 'reverberated with the rhythms, accents, and diction that ILaurence] had rediscovered to her great joy in writing The Stone Angel.' I can only report that I find no connection whatsoever between Hagar's richly metaphoric, carefully modulated, eloquent, spontaneous, spunky, early-twentieth-century prairie voice and Purdy's deliberately assumed, self-consciously slurred, demotic Ontarian. A little earlier, Lennox remarks that 'Purdy's humour, lack of pretension, and bluff, direct voice were instantly familiar and appealing,' and I find myself challenging that 'direct.' On the contrary, I believe that one of the most fascinating aspects of the correspondence lies in the difference - at least at the outset - between the styles and procedures...

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