A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing ed. by Anita Pacheco (review)

56 epic, that with Gay’s second series of fables (1738), singleness of address, as opposed to ambiguity, became ‘‘the main characteristic of orthodox verse fable until the end of the century,’’that across the century it moved away from themes of power to those of interaction and relationship . To all these ideas, which Mr. Loveridge tends to toss off as casual asides rather than reasoned arguments, one is tempted to say, maybe yes, and maybe no. The genre as Mr. Loveridge conceives it is sufficiently amorphous to accommodate nearly any historical generalization . Mr. Loveridge does a more useful service when he attempts to provide a poetics ; this entails what he calls the ‘‘double capacity’’ of fables, their tendency to provide one level of meaning for the superficial reader, another for the more sophisticated , which means fables canseem to endorse a system of order, yet subvert it. Armed with this idea, Mr. Loveridge analyzes a wide range of material, including Aesop and La Fontaine in their many manifestations, Ogilby, Mandeville , and Gay, as well as a miscellaneous assortment of parables, beast stories, allegories , moral exempla that appear in everything fromplaysandnovelstoSpectator papers and anecdotes. At times the analyses are perceptive, but at times, unintelligible , and the emphasis on doubleness too often results in producing expanding sets of paradoxes that can lead to skewed interpretations. Swift’s poems, for example, turn out to be so multilayered with doublenessthattheyendupambiguous and self-contradictory, and Dryden ’s ‘‘Hind and the Panther’’ is so riddled with paradox that it makes a case both for and against Catholicism, which would have surprised Dryden. One has to wonder whether doubleness constitutes a genuine poetics for fable or merely an organizing device for handling intractable material. Much of what Mr. Loveridge says about the political innuendo in fables , of their power to subvert, of their habit of saying one thing while meaning another, could be said of satire. Think Gulliver’s Travels or A Modest Proposal. But then again, satire is presumably a subset of fables, and we are back to the basic problem of a genre too unstable and vast to describe. I do not believe Mr. Loveridge ever gets close to his professed goal, although he provides interesting insights along the way. Cedric D. Reverand II University of Wyoming A Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Anita Pacheco. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. xx ⫹ 391. $104.99. This volume provides a ‘‘studentoriented ’’guide to the literary, social, and cultural history of women’s writing from 1550 to 1700; it is therefore of limitedbut far from negligible value for students of literature in the period beginning in 1660. The book is divided into four parts: I ‘‘Contexts,’’II‘‘Readings,’’III‘‘Genres,’’ IV ‘‘Issues and Debates.’’ Part One contains chapters on education, religion,law, work, and writing. Most of these are concerned mainly with the Renaissance and have only marginal relevance to the post1660 period. The chapter on ‘‘Women and Writing’’ by Margaret J. Ezell is an exception. In an essay notable for itswide range of reference, conciseness, and critical acumen, she surveys women’s writing up to the end of the seventeenth century and previews developments after 1700. Part Two, ‘‘Readings,’’ allots separate chapters to each of ‘‘the best known and most frequently studied’’ women writers 57 of the period. The danger or benefit of thus lending support to the formation of a ‘‘canon’’ of women writers is an issue that appears not to worry the editor. The familiar names from1660–1700 arehere: Cavendish, Philips, Behn, and Astell. Many late seventeenth-century women besides these four, however, also appear in the book. Part Three, ‘‘Genres,’’allows room for briefer treatment of a considerable number of writers from the later period: Mary Rich, Anne Halkett, and Agnes Beaumont under ‘‘Autobiography ’’; Bathsua Makin, Sarah Fyge Egerton , Mary Lee (Lady Chudleigh), and others, under ‘‘Defences of Women ’’; Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, Egerton again, and ‘‘Ephelia’’under‘‘Women ’s Poetry’’; Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Mary Delarivier Manley under ‘‘Drama.’’ Among absences or under -representations are Anne Bradstreet (brief references only) and Lucy Hutchinson (no discussion of her translation of Lucretius).AnneFinchmakesafewfleeting appearances but is evidently regarded as too late for...