Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives ed. by Helen M. Buss, D.L. Macdonald, Anne McWhir (review)

humanities 407 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Helen M. Buss, D.L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir, editors. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives Wilfrid Laurier University Press. x, 330.$49.95 This volume of essays examines the lives and work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from scholarly, biographical, theoretical, and creative perspectives, taking as its informing context the theory and practice of life writing. Its genesis was a conference sponsored by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities in 1997, organized to correspond with the bicentenary of the daughter=s birth and mother=s post-partum death. Notable contributors from Canada, Australia, and the United States have participated in a multi- and interdisciplinary inquiry into this motherdaughter pair whose powerfully unfolding and radiating achievements and relationships involved the brief overlap of only a few days of actual lived time. Contributors to this volume (Judith Barbour, Betty T. Bennett, Helen M. Buss, Syndy McMillen Conger, Gary Kelly, Lawrence R. Kennard, D.L. Macdonald, S. Leigh Matthews, Anne McWhir, Anne K. Mellor, Jeanne Moskal, Jeanne Perreault, Charles E. Robinson, Rose Scollard, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Vargo) bring a rich variety of expertise and accomplishment to this project that centres on exploring the complexities of life writing. Chief features of these complexities are, the editors note, life writing=s >elusive subject, its paradoxical intent, and its historically contingent relation with its readers.= This volume is informed throughout by the energizingly thoughtful acknowledgment that >lives,= a word encompassing >both lived experience and literary production,= are inseparable from >works,= a word >similarly includ[ing] both the process of production and the finished product, whether authorized, edited, distorted, or adapted.= This volume, in examining >intersecting lives and intersecting texts,= aims to keep the following question foregrounded: How does one >do justice to their human meaning=? This question might have sounded naïve at best (or worst) or unfashionable at worst (or best) as recently as five or perhaps even fewer years ago. But the intention and responsibility to do justice to the human meaning of intersecting lives and the texts produced by and associated with these lives have re-emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries B some would say they never disappeared B as essential to the poetics and practice of life writing. These essays are informed by an invigorating variety of perspectives (Marxism, stylistics, psychoanalysis, intertextuality, memoir theory, bibliography , standpoint theory, and deconstruction). The collection also includes Rose Scollard=s original drama Caves of Fancy, an intricately powerful imaginative rendering of Wollstonecraft and Shelley. The contributors= xxxxxx 408 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 work is varied yet also coherent in its individual and cumulative commitment to mapping the relationships >between a mother and daughter, between two writing lives, and B more broadly B between two generations of writers.= In so doing this collection pays homage, by a kind of deeply informed and admiring imitation, to the richness of these two women=s powerful lives and achievements. These essays will be of self-evident interest to scholars and critics of Wollstonecraft and Shelley and a number of their early and later Romantic contemporaries, Byron, Coleridge, Godwin, Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, among them. It will also be of interest to scholar-critic-theorists and practitioners of life writing, to feminist scholar-critics, and potentially also to a wide-ranging audience of common readers intrigued by the mystery of intersections among writers= lives, work, and human relationships. (CATHERINE N. PARKE) Barbara K. Seeber. General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism McGill-Queen=s University Press. x, 160. $42.95 Barbara Seeber runs suggestive parallels between Jane Austen and Adrienne Rich=s Aunt Jennifer, whose terrified hands weighed down by patriarchy embroider tigers that are >prancing, proud and unafraid.= >Gentle Jane,= argues Seeber, practises a similarly subversive art, although she uses a pen to inscribe that >little Bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory= rather than plying Aunt Jennifer=s more acceptable ivory needle. As this book competently shows, commentators often debate whether Austen is conformist or subversive, but Seeber cuts the critical knot by...