The Works of Mary Leapor by Mary Leapor (review)

320 how that history of gender and sexual difference still influences their production and reception today. Ms. Copeland has chapters on The Rover (1677), with a focus on both Killigrew’s Thomaso, from which Behn took much of her material , and Behn’s own reworking of her plot in The Second Part of the Rover, as well as on The Rover’s place in the repertoire across the eighteenth century. Another chapter similarly examines Behn’s The Luckey Chance (1686) in relation to subsequent adaptations of its wifeselling plot in Haywood’s A Wife to be Lett (1723) and Hannah Cowley’s A School for Greybeards (1786). Studying the casting of each play, Ms. Copeland ably demonstrates how, despite the strength of her female characters, Behn’s plays were gradually adapted to conform to an emergent ideology of ‘‘female sexual passivity.’’ Subsequent chapters take on Centlivre ’s The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder (1714). Here, there is a particular emphasis both on the ways that Marplot in the former and Violante in the latter violate male and female gender norms and on how subsequent productions tried to eliminate those challenges. The final chapter, on three recent productions of Behn’s Rover, demonstrates how the play has been ‘‘remade’’ to reflect ‘‘contemporary theatrical and cultural practices, including . . . conventions of gendered behaviour.’’ Ms. Copeland skillfully reminds us that the significance of the plays is produced as much on the stage as on the page. At times, her detailed textual comparisons cause her to lose sight of gender . She also lets other critics speak where her own commentary might be more useful. But these are flaws of her excessive generosity and are far overshadowed by the merits of this excellent study. Lisa A. Freeman University of Illinois at Chicago MARY LEAPOR. The Works of Mary Leapor , ed. Richard Greene and Ann Messenger . Oxford and New York: Oxford, 2003. Pp. xlii ⫹ 358. £89; $150. Leapor died tragically before her two substantial volumes of poetry were published by subscription in 1748 and 1751 respectively. Her work subsequently gained prominent notice in Colman and Thornton’s 1755 anthology, Poems by Eminent Ladies, and by 1779, Leapor was being championed in the pages of the Lady’s Magazine as ‘‘one of the most extraordinary women that ever appeared in the poetic world.’’ The editors of this edition temper but nevertheless echo this assessment, noting that Leapor was ‘‘one of the most capable poets of the mideighteenth century.’’Her return to critical favor was born out of feminist recovery research in the 1980s, but her reputation in recent years has matured under the banner of aesthetics. As the first collected edition of a laboring-class woman’s writing, The Works of Mary Leapor testifies that, above all else, she was a good poet. The volume includes a lengthy Introduction , noteworthy for Mr. Greene’s expertise on Leapor’s biography and his pithy summaries of the major criticism on her work. The editors have largely followed the original two-volume division in presenting the texts that follow, with two notable exceptions: Bridget Freemantle’s prefatory letter from the 1751 volume has been moved forward, and Leapor’s dramatic efforts, which interrupted the poetry in that volume, have been moved back. These changes lend 321 coherence to the project of creating a single edition from Leapor’s two published volumes, while still preserving the important tonal differences that exist between them. As the editors note, the bulk of Leapor’s more strident, ideologically complex verse appeared in the 1751 volume ; hence, it means something in Leapor Studies to maintain this division. The editors have also chosen, I think correctly , to retain original spelling and punctuation throughout, and they reproduce several typographical aspects of the original texts (full caps, italics, first-word small caps, and inconsistent use of all of these in individual poem titles). The result is aesthetically striking on the page, and the poetic texts throughout are well executed, as befitting an Oxford edition. Less befitting, however, is the editors’ system of light annotation. The editors appear to be thinking of their specialist readers when terms like ‘‘coursers,’’ ‘‘Grub-street,’’ and ‘‘peck’’ go unglossed. Certainly non-British students...