The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret by Susanna Centlivre (review)

142 thee. Now, I say, a Woman’s Counsel is not worth much, yet he that despises it, is no wiser than he shou’d be.’’’ Smollett ’s prose has a better pace and more pungency than Jarvis’s. Motteux cannot resist embellishing the passage, an offense to Hispanists, but, I confess, having first read Don Quixote in his version, I remain partial to it. Borges suggests that Don Quixote’s ‘‘greatest (and perhaps only irrefutable) worth may be its psychological acumen,’’ not its style, which explains why it ‘‘wins posthumous battles against histranslators and survives each and every careless version .’’ The greatness of Cervantes lies in the characters of his knightand squire,for in them one finds his artistry, in them the pathos that allows us to overlook the cruelty of the humor Nabokov found so offensive , and in themthecollisionbetween fiction and reality that makes this work the most ancient and modern of books. Joseph Kronick Louisiana State University ROBERT TER HORST. The Fortunes of the Novel. A Study in the Transposition of a Genre. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. xi ⫹ 303. $39.95 (paper) Mr. ter Horst studies the development of the novel in Spain and England through the dialectic intersection of two principal forces: poetics and economics. His intent is to trace the emergence of the novel as a genre that captures the conflicting economic and moral conceptions of worth in English and Spanish societies from the 1500s to the 1800s. He richly covers the first picaresque novel, El lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Guzman de Alfarache (1599–1604), and Cervantes’s exemplary novelLagitanilla(1613).Disparate novels, such as Lazarillo,Guzman, and Robinson Crusoe (1719), sharealack or implicit negation of the figure of the father and affiliation of the protagonists and their nation as homeland. The issue of legitimate versus illegitimate engendering illuminates our understanding of Tom Jones (1749), Oliver Twist (1837–1839) and David Copperfield (1849). In a study of Robinson Crusoe , Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724), the themes of ‘‘storms’’ and ‘‘shipwreck’’ are common, since these potent images ‘‘summon the craft of survivorship that helps to accreditanewkind of women and men, the self-possessed individual who dominates the fiction of Defoe.’’ His fiction centers on dispossession and the pathway to wealth, the latter being ‘‘dubious and long,’’ and often implying the difficult or impossible balance between morality and economy. Whereas in old world societies, poor subjects resort to begging, in Moll’s society,poverty and bankruptcy do not preclude but exclude charity and the company of the just. In an admirable effort to base his study on a meticulous reading of a vast number of texts against their background forces, Mr. ter Horst exhibits a sharp critical eye and comprehensive understanding of literary traditions. But the intricate relationship between the main poles of the study, economics and poetics, is more sustained by analogy than evidence. Ana Marı́a Laguna Rutgers University Camden SUSANNA CENTLIVRE. The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, ed. John O’Brien. Peterborough, ONT: Broadview, 2004. Pp. 147. $12.95. Containing a concise Introduction, skimpy but well-chosen Appendices of contextual material, and helpful suggestions for further reading, this handsome 143 edition of Centlivre’s The Wonder makes accessible one of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century. The melancholy woman illustrated on the cover (repressing a secret?) does not reflect the play’s spirited heroines. In preserving the script’s rhetorical punctuation, Mr. O’Brien emphasizesthe oral effect of this fast paced and popular comedy. By contrast, the full translations into Standard English of Gibby’s Scots flatten thereader’sexperienceofthecharacter ’s voice. Although the notes are necessarily much briefer here than those in the Pickering and Chatto edition, the inclusion of Garrick’s alterations to Act 5 shows how the play was performed later in the century. The careful textual notes, appearing after the Epilogue, would be more useful with the addition of line numbers in the text. Having chosen as his copy-text the 1714 first edition, Mr. O’Brien silently suppresses from his title page the attribution, ‘‘Written by the Author of The Gamester,’’foundinthecopytext . Appearing alongside a signed dedication , this contradictory gesture toward anonymity on the...