Editing Women ed. by Ann M. Hutchinson (review)

59 soliloquies of all the women charactersin Trotter’s plays who, as Ms. Kelley says, turn to other women for support and comfort . Ms. Kelley mischaracterizes Piers’s letters to the young Trotter when she says the affection displayed is ‘‘rhetorical rather than literal.’’ Piers’s letters jar the reader with the writer’s awkward apologies as she voices her passionate inability to stopherselffromutteringwhatshesays Trotter will see as a transgression. Behind Trotter’s repetitiveness, abstraction from experience, and austere impersonality is a woman who endured ridicule, low status, and, in reaction, was inclined to sudden identifications with admired people and passionate loyalties. In her youth, she converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and back again; in her later years, she writes as a woman who married because she had to and has lived in isolatedpoverty;thestrainedcontent of her essays represents her way of asserting a barricaded self-respect. Her letters reveal the limited choices and rejections her position inflicted on her. Ms. Kelley analyzes a poem to reveal that Trotter identified with ‘‘the dilemma faced by poor and obscure men like [Stephen ] Duck,’’ but fails to connect this identification with Trotter’s intense presentation of her self. The immediate and more recent interest (which Ms. Kelley records) suggests that Trotter engages her audience. The symbolically epistolary Olinda’s Adventures focuses on a young woman who, offered only exploitative choices, manages to hold on to a modicum of peace and respectability by distancing herself from everyone but her correspondent. Trotter’s comedy, Love at a Loss, or Most Votes Carry It (1701), has lively women who, in order to achieve even a limited private freedom of conduct, view men as potential enemies against whom they have to form alliances, or else lie to them or dominate them emotionally. Their fates expose the lie that breaking taboos must destroy a woman’s life; one of her heroines has sexual intercourse before marriage and is not punished for it at all. Trotter has an attractive living voice; we hear it when she characterizes Etherege’s Man of Mode as a play where ‘‘Deceit’s a jest, false vows are gallantry,’’ and means it when she advises the aspiring poet: ‘‘Let ev’ry Dorimant appear a knave.’’ Reacting to the prejudice which Trotter ’s work, personality, and life story face has made Ms. Kelly unwilling to present these vulnerabilities frankly, but it is in their context that we can best hear, understand , and admire Trotter. Ellen Moody George Mason University Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchinson. Toronto and Cardiff: Toronto and Wales, 1998. Pp. x ⫹ 140. $40; $14.95 (paper). The grammatical ambiguity of the title reflects the double nature of Editing Women, five papers by women editors about editing women’s texts, plus a response by another woman editor. Originally delivered in 1995, these essays engage more closely with gender or feminist issues than with editorial doctrine in general: debates over the theory and politics of text-editing that raged throughout the decade up to 1995 rouse only muffled echoes here. But as a set of studies dealing pragmatically with editorial problems posed by specific texts by women and generalizing about editorial principles and ethics, the volume is of considerable interest. The subjects range in time from the fourteenth century (Felicity Riddle on Julian of Norwich) to the 60 twentieth (Naomi Black on Virginia Woolf’s, Three Guineas, Joan Coldwell on Anne Wilkinson). The remaining papers concern editorial problems in the long eighteenth century: Germaine Greer writes on ‘‘Editorial Conundra in the Texts of Katherine Philips,’’ while Isobel Grundy discusses ‘‘Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.’’ In addition Margaret Doody, in her ‘‘Response,’’seizes the opportunity to talk about her own experiences as editor of writings by Burney and Austen. Ms. Grundy’s editorial position is based on David Fleeman’s conceptoftext as‘‘process,’’summarilydescribedbyher as ‘‘text-as-flux, subject to eternal revision .’’ The extraordinarily complicated history of Montagu’s published texts and her ‘‘devious’’ attempts to ensure publication —told here in abundant detail— undermine the chimera of a ‘‘definitive edition.’’ What makes Ms. Grundy especially illuminatingoneditorialprinciples, however, is the insight derived from her thirty years’ practice as editor of Montagu ’s varied output. Over...