Tras el espejo la musa escribe. Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro ed. por Julián Olivares and Elizabeth S. Boyce (review)

n8 ..i-REVIEWS~ Julian Olivares and Elizabeth S. Boyce, eds. Tras el espejo la musa escribe. Liricafemenina de los Siglos de Oro. Madrid: Siglo XXI de Espana, 1993. 40pls. +xii+706pp. ISBN 84-323-0781-5. Recent years have seen an abundance of works on Teresa de Jesus and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, but also on less renowned women writers, such as those studied by Electa Arenql and Stacey Schlau in UntoldSisters,HispanicNuns in TheirOwn Works(1989).The anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth -century Spanish women poets edited by Julian Olivares and Elizabeth S. Boyce, Traselespejolamusaescribe. Lfrica JemeninadelasSiglosde Oro,thus coincides with a major push forward in the project of ransoming Golden Age and Colonial Spanish American women writers from oblivion and neglect. It comes, also, at a time when the influence on literature of sixteenth - and seventeenth-century Spanish piety is being reconsidered in the work of Elizabeth Rhodes and others. This anthology, which contains a number of religious texts, will be an important contribution to these endeavors of rediscovery and reassessment. The poets included in the collection are Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Catalina Clara Ramirez de Guzman, Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor, Violante del Cielo, Marcia Belisarda, Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea, Cristobalina Fernandez de Alarcon, Luisa de C.arvajal y Mendoza, Sor Maria de la Antigua and Sor Marcela de San Felix. Almost every poetic kind common to Golden Age Spain can be found here. These women poets used learned forms like the sonnet, the lira,the canci6n,the epfstola and the octava,as well as popular forms such as ballads, villancicos, redondillas, decimasand others. Similarly, the subject matter of their poems seems to run the gamut of possibilities . They write of erotic love and of divine love, of jealousy and of female friendship, of portraits and shawls that they never got, of maternal figures who grow old·and embroider so much that their eyes grow dim, of traitorous lovers, martyred saints and of the "perfect husband," Christ. Some of.their subjects, therefore, seem to parallel themes common to the male-authored poetry of this period, while others ,appear unfamiliar, fresh and surprisingly new. Constrained until now by the sheer weight of the predominantly male Golden Age literary canon and by the lack of accessible editions, students of the poetry of the time are now in a position to more fully understand the poetic production of this period, thanks to this anthology and works of its kind. Acknowledging their debt to Manuel Serrano y Sanz's Apuntes para una bibliotecade escritorasespafiolas(1905) and his Antologfa de escritoras espafiolas (1915), the editors have established their own text by consulting both manuscripts and princepsof the poems. We can be relatively confident that their archival efforts in Spain have safeguarded their edition from the ~REVIEWS_(., rrg kinds of errors made by previous modem editors. Olivares and Boyce have modernized spelling, punctuation and accentuation, retaining the original spelling in cases where the rhyme would be affected by orthographic change. In very few cases have they preserved archaic forms, such as "huygan ." They have modernized contractions common to Golden Age poetic language ("desta, della, deso"), but have retained forms such as "aquesta" and "aquesto," as well as cases of "lafsmo" and "lefsmo." The editors have also indicated textual variants, when these exist. A lengthy introduction (100 pp) precedes the presentation of the collections of poems, separated according to author. The purpose of this introduction , according to the editors, is to provide "directrices para el aprecio crftico de esta poesfa literaria" (97). The editors have divided their introduction into four, parts: "La poesfa amorosa," "La poesfa religiosa," "La comunidad femenina," and "La naturaleza." Of these four parts, the first offers by far the deepest insights into the kinds of problems we encounter in approaching women's lyric of this period . These difficulties stem from our not having posed, until very recent years, basic questions about how women writers in early modern Spain overcame numerous obstacles to their picking up the pen in the first place, since to do so meant to enter into the field of literature, which was a public activity dominated by men {16).Olivares and Boyce...