An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting by Jane Collier (review)

171 self as the weak woman—‘‘I desire you to consider I am a poor ignorant Woman , and have erred out of ignorance’’ (Tryal and Sentence, 1680)—while speaking out in a way that transgressed expectations of female behavior. Work remains to be done on how much of her history of midwifery or her model for a college derives from male-authored works. For example, her retelling of the story of Agnodike, ‘‘the first midwife,’’ is based on Jacques Guillemeau’s ChildBirth or, the Happy Deliverie of Women (English translation, 1612), a text recommended to trainee midwives in the 1660s/1670s. This suggests that Cellier may have trained with a senior midwife with whom she would have read the central texts. But her version of the tale is entirely personal, adding extra features that reflect her own life. Her attackers claimed her pamphlets were in fact authored by men, but her own voice comes through clearly in both these and the accounts of her trials. Her enemies challenged her by using negative stereotypes of Catholics—such as Pope Joan—as well as images of the midwife as bawd, prostitute, and gossip, giving birth to lies rather than to children, and called her allegations of torture ‘‘silly abortive Brats . . . brought into the World by her wicked Paws’’ (Modesty Triumphing over Impudence, 1680). However, as the texts collected here show so well, these ‘‘wicked Paws’’ could also wield a witty and incisive pen. Helen King University of Reading, UK JANE COLLIER. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, ed. Katharine A. Craik. Oxford: Oxford, 2006. Pp. xlv ⫹ 111. $12.95 (paper). Jane Collier’s minor work has been republished three times in the last dozen years, a facsimile edition, edited by Judith Hawley (Thoemmes, 1994), a textbook edition, edited by Audrey Bilger (Broadview, 2003), and now this edition in the Oxford World Classics series. At the risk of tormenting those committed to her revival, I would suggest that we now have more than enough editions of this work and a moratorium of perhaps half a century might be in order. Collier’s slight work is entertaining enough at a rather unsophisticated level; the irony is simplistic, the writing without distinction, and the various situations described had been—or would be—much better presented in the novels of Haywood, Richardson, the Fieldings, Smollett, Burney, and Austen—that is to say, in sustained narratives where one person (Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park comes readily to mind) torments another , whether an underling, a spouse, or one’s own child. The creation of dramatized characters in narrative is a far more effective form to illustrate the ‘‘art of tormenting’’ than any series of instructions , where repetition and tediousness , simply because of the sameness of the presentation, cannot be avoided. Collier’s work has all the problems of its original design, and while there are clever moments, the work never rises beyond that cleverness. One would prefer, therefore, an introduction that might acknowledge that we are not in the presence here of the accomplished novelists, much less of the satirists like Pope and Swift. Unfortunately , given the landscape of our era, such evaluative clouds are nowhere on the horizon (and this edition of Collier is merely symptomatic and certainly not the unique culprit). We begin with the notion that this is ‘‘a courageous social 172 satire published at a time when satires were usually written by and for men. It is also an advice book, a handbook of anti-etiquette, and an energetic comedy of manners.’’ All these assertions— and assertions far outweigh demonstrations —are padded and repadded in 45 ingeniously tormenting pages. The expected conclusion comes at the beginning of the discussion: ‘‘Her work seems animated less by the impulse to expose women’s frailties than to lay bare the humourless and patronizing double standards which underpinned many contemporary assumptions about femininity.’’ In actuality, the work seems designed to expose sadistic qualities in human beings that emerge in situations of authority and power—that gothic fiction and the Marquis de Sade loom on the horizon hardly seems a mere accident of history. But sadism is neither exclusively male nor female, and while we might well...