Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law 1857–1914 by Barbara Leckie (review)

humanities 437 and Irving Howe, two of the major figures absent from Lord's inquiry, could have given her some direction, if little comfort. In his staggering essay on Conrad, Howe observes that `beneath the controlled stiffness of Conrad's stoicism, as beneath his conservatism, there flows a bleak and terrible disbelief, a radical skepticism that corrodes the underside of everything he values.' The inference one draws from Howe and Warren, from Avrom Fleishman and Ursula Lord, among many others, is that Conrad scholars should have nerves of steel, an ability, as Howe puts it in the context of modernism in general, to keep a grip on the problematic. (MARK LEVENE) Barbara Leckie. Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law 1857B1914 University of Pennsylvania Press. vi, 300. US $37.50 This is a refreshing and illuminating study of the influence of newspaper reporting of high-profile adultery cases on late nineteenth-century English novels, particularly those of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. Barbara Leckie argues that modernist literary techniques like telling an unhappy love story from multiple points of view rather than in a linear manner, filtering it through an unreliable narrator, and leaving the ending ambiguous or open derive from the way stories from the divorce court were documented in English newspapers. Furthermore, the continuation of these stories from day to day in the newspapers had a parallel in the structure of a novel in chapters and instalments, both pushing the reader to look for resolution. She points out that though there were many French novels about adultery (indeed, the term `French novel' came to mean a novel of adultery), French newspapers did not print proceedings of divorce cases, and while it was not uncommon for French novels to describe adultery from the point of view of the betrayer (Emma Bovary being the most notable example), English novelists, like English journalists, told such stories from the perspective of the betrayed. For it was only the betrayed, of course, who sought redress in the divorce court. Leckie discusses the progress of adultery from the courtroom to the newspaper to the novel in terms of the effect on English culture, which in some respects took on the role of nanny, restricting discussion of a topic that could corrupt the new and growing nineteenth-century audience of young women. She maintains, however, that though critics and lending libraries insisted at the time that adultery was not a fit subject for literary representation and literary scholars claim even now that the nineteenthcentury English novel reflects this view, between 1857, when the Matrimonial Causes Act was passed and divorce moved from canon law to civil law, and 1914, not only was adultery highly visible in popular fiction but it was a central feature of some novels that came to be regarded as masterpieces. This representation was quite consistent with cultural 438 letters in canada 1999 taboos, says Leckie, in that it stressed the inevitable tragic consequences. In these novels, as in the divorce court, the focus was primarily on female adultery. As Leckie points out, part of the public's fascination with divorce court stories derived from fears that female sexuality could not be controlled and that female sexual transgression would not be adequately punished. Another part of the fascination was doubtless due to the reminder that betrayal was always made easier by the trust of the innocent betrayed. Thanks to lessons provided by divorce court proceedings reported in newspapers, in English fiction, says Leckie, `the watchful spouse, more and more frequently, becomes the canny recorder of her or his partner's wrongdoing.' This book, extensively researched and carefully thought out, deserved more attention in the editing stage than it received. The case of Madeleine Smith, an unmarried woman who murdered her lover, is allowed to stand as an example of adulterous behaviour apparently because the Saturday Review mistakenly interpreted it as such. Other small, annoying errors (Richard Feveral; The Portrait of the Lady) detract from the overall impression. Nonetheless, it is well worth the time of any Victorianist. (JUDITH KNELMAN) Douglas Cole. Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858B1906 Douglas and McIntyre/University of Washington Press. viii, 360. $45.00...