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74 sentences are marked by ellipses, but deletions of entire paragraphs or parts of paragraphs go unmarked. There is a considerable amount of repointing, especially to simplify syntax by the removal of semi-colons and dashes, which, in the case of the latter, compromises the liveliness of the prose. There are also glosses in square brackets directly in the text, for example: ‘‘Could you have been my sister [sister-inlaw ]!’’ Overall, the editorial policy has produced a coherent book, but it is much duller than it should be. It turns out that the repetitions, ornaments and even the ‘‘moralistic without thought’’ (which is an unfair characterization), although they may not contribute to moving the plot along, are important. The characters have been flattened: a Lovelace who quotes very little poetry, and whose increasingly absurd contrivances (Captain Tomlinson) are much less intricate, and a Clarissa whose soul-searching is terse and perfunctory. Richardson’s greatest formal achievement in Clarissa, the double perspective of the novel in letters that juxtaposes different accounts of the same events, is redundant in an abridgment . In this version, for example, Clarissa is offended that Lovelace has represented her as his sister at St. Albans (Letter 98), but we do not return to this moment as Lovelace’s sense of himself as poet-creator brings him to claim that ‘‘Ovid was not a greater master of metamorphoses ’’ (Letter 103, which does not appear in the abridgment). The dramatic nature of the narration often is missing. For example, the interview with Solmes, a major emotional event in which Clarissa heroically stands up for herself in the face of her brother, sister, Uncle Antony, and Solmes himself (Letter 78), is completely omitted. Elsewhere, if a scene is not deleted altogether, it can be considerably reduced. Letter 94, Clarissa’s account of the abduction, conveying her confusion and terror in the garden, and her immediate self-reflection at St. Albans , is reduced from about 7,000 words to less than half. What remains is an account of what happened. What is lost is a recreation of how it felt at the moment, and an extended account of Clarissa’s shocked mortification. The moral framework, moreover, is oversimplified. Many passages of Clarissa ’s reflection, and her later religious meditations, are deleted, presumably because they are made ‘‘without thought.’’ The rich complication of Clarissa’s articulation of a moral principle that poses the individual self against society (while, simultaneously, in Johnson’s words, ‘‘there is always something she prefers to truth’’) here becomes a mere opposition that protests too much. A different compromise to the moral framework can be seen in the deletion of much of Belford’s reformation in the final third of the novel, which is the most compressed. Abridging Clarissa reduces it to conventional narrative. We are left to ask what all the fuss is about, for there are traces left of passion, of moral assessment , of the intricacies of plotting and writing, but they are disconnected from the dense web that distinguishes this work. Christopher Fanning Queen’s University, Kingston SCOTT HESS. Authoring the Self: SelfRepresentation , Authorship, and the 75 Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. viii ⫹ 395. $90. Authoring the Self is a strange read. It takes a while to realize that for a book with a title such as ‘‘authoring the self’’ there is a remarkable lack of psychological language. You can read Mr. Hess’s work without first preparing yourself by immersion in theories developed by Albert Bandura or Henry Murray, or without taking the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to determine your own identity. Authoring the Self looks at the idea that with the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 the relationship between the author , the printer, the bookseller, and the reading public changed so significantly that it represented a radical departure from previous practices and required authors to create a new type of public persona . This strategy, Mr. Hess argues, having been made necessary in 1695, became possible after the 1710 Statute of Anne gave authors at least some control over copyright, control that would steadily increase over the next century or so, allowing his book...

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