Lodore by Mary Shelley (review)

B1JMAN1TIES 479 left unsaid by the company/s management and left undiscovered by later historians who relied only on the narrative. His fifty-three pages of endnotes, most of which is primary documentation, will provide the future researcher a starting point to continue his extensive study. Mackie was willing to take on unpleasant subjects, often neglected by the romantics. In his chapter 'The Native Foundation of Trade and Labour/ Mackie addresses the pervasiveness of Native slavery in and around the fur trade and even at the district's headquarters, Fort Vancouver. Nor is he afraid to confront the conclusions of his notable colleagues. He disagrees with Gibson that the Americans withdrew voluntarily from the coastal fur trade/ noting that the HBC's combination of coastal posts with vessels plying routes between made the Pacific Northwest so un_profitable that the Americans were forced to retreat. Although one would do best to read Trading beyond the Mountai11s cover to cover, its chapters are so arranged to stand alone for anyone with a modest understanding of the Pacific Northwest fur trade. To do that, Mackie occasionally repeats information contained in previous chapters, a small annoyance to the cover-to-cover reader when one considers that many others may be seeking specific information rather than a general overview. His graphics are excellent. The book'srnaps are clear, straightforward , and well placed. The many period drawings and paintings allow the reader to visualize the subject about which he wrote. If this reader was to ask for one addition to this otherwise excellent book, it would be a brief digression on how the Columbia District fitted into the larger Hudson's Bay Company picture. I was left with the question, was the Columbia District more autonomous because of Simpson, its remoteness, or because of its modest profit in comparison to the rest of the company's holdings? Richard Mackie's Trading be1jond the Mountains is a milestone study of the Hudson's Bay Company. It is a fresh approach to an old subject and is based on thoroughly modem research. It should be read by anyone interested in the history of the fur trade or the early history of the Canadian or American West.lt will certainly find a central place on this reader's book shelf. (DICK WILSON) Mary SheHey. Lodore. Edited by Lisa Vargo Broadview Press. 560. $15.95 Growing interest in Mary Shelley's writing beyond Franke11stein has recently been demonstrated in works by, among others, Anne K. Mellorf Nora Crook, and Jane Blumberg. Lisa Vargo's edition of Mary Shelley's 1835 novel Lodore, included in the Broadview Literary Texts series, is an overdue and welcome addition to an accessible and growing Shelley canon. Vargo asserts in her Introduction that 'the consequence of individual 480 LETITRS IN CANADA 1997 actions' and an 'examination of contemporary debates about women' are central thematic concerns in this text, and she rightly promotes Lodore's viability within the Romantic literary canon. She has provided an accessible text which should prove highly useful in our classrooms. Shelley's primary focus in Lodore centres on the issues of family and education so prevalent in much of her fiction. Mothers and daughters are estranged, sibling love is strong, and fathers educate daughters with a divergent range of approaches in a fascinating commentary upon contemporary education debates. Ranging from Illinois to Italy, Shelley draws episodes in her complex plot from her own life, but she also ventures far from her experiences as well as beyond conventional contemporary expectations of propriety in women's fiction in 1835. While, to a certain extent, the Lodore family's struggles are in accordance with domestk concerns women writers were expected to promote, Fanny Derham (Ethel Lodore's best friend) is a child of both Mary Wollstonecraft and of William Godwin and a radical revision of the role of the single woman. Shelley pointedly attributes Cornelia Lodore's egotistical manoeuvrings to the·negative principles in which her mother educated her~ whiJe Ethel's goodness is intimately aligned with isolated and careful upbringing by her father. As in much of Shelley's fiction, fathers' intimacies with daughters are dominant and both genders are flawed; true love...