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B o o k R ev iew s strength of the volume by setting out the issues covered, describing the essays and pointing out paths for further reflection. The essays are arranged chronologically, with a first sec­ tion focusing on the early women writers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a larger section comprising eight articles on the 18th century when the epistolary genre was at its most popular. A final third section on 19th- and 20th-century writers rounds out the collection. The authors of the essays are also varied, including younger scholars as well as established scholars such as Janet Altman, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Suzanne Pucci. W ithout excep­ tion all the essays are of extremely high quality, fully documented—some of the end-notes are themselves informative, up-to-the-minute, mini-bibliographies on related topics—and models of lucid analysis and refined literary criticism. Since 1975, then, criticism on works by and about women has progressed to a point where false issues about the nature o f women’s writing and resistance to women’s studies are slowly being cleared away, and it is possible to focus on the most important task, close reading of works that will illuminate the place of women in our literature and culture. Out of this volume arise, however, two sobering thoughts that mitigate any satisfaction at the achievements concerning the place of women in literature. The first is that it took at least 25 years to come this far in criticism, and, moreover, about four centuries for women’s voices to be heard in the culture at large. The other sobering thought is a theme repeated in this volume: not only in the past did most of the women writers have to contend with dimin­ ished expectations about them in the dominant culture, but even in our own time women have to continue to use subversion, gestures of denial or deferral that paradoxically serve to assert their voices. This remarkable volume makes us reflect on the struggle begun long ago by women and on the continuation of this struggle of women to be heard with and against the grain of dominant cultural values and voices. Sy l v ie Ro m a n o w s k i Northwestern University Victor Brombert. T h e H id d e n Re a d e r : St e n d h a l , Ba l z a c , H u g o , Ba u d e l a ir e , F l a u b e r t . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. 226. Victor Brombert’s latest book brings together nineteen critical essays, all but two of which have already appeared in print in various scholarly journals, ranging as far back as 1954. A good number of these essays, however, have been substantially revised for inclu­ sion in the present work and eleven of them appear in English translation for the first time. They thus have something to offer both the experienced critic and the English reader perhaps unfamiliar with Brombert’s published work in French. The essays, which cover works by five major figures of nineteenth-century French literature, are loosely grouped around the rubric of the “ hidden reader,” which is here not meant to denote a specific preoccupation with the narratee (ie narrataire) or even with the more general field of “ reader response” criiticism, but rather is defined by the author as “ the act of reading made manifest at a number of levels; and the strategies of concealment, conscious and unconscious, which in the writing/reading process remain inseparable from the desire to reveal.” In spite of the title, the reader should not expect, therefore, a theo­ retical treatise on the fictional reader imbedded in the literary text. Brombert is too wary of the distortions and omissions often effected by a particular critical bias to make theory the central focus of his text. In his introduction, entitled “ Approaches,” he in fact makes an VOL. XXXI, NO. 3 93 L ’E spr it C réa te u r impassioned plea for the need to “ return to the text,” to listen to the unique voice of...

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