Selected Drama and Verse by Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (review)

The study of women's writing in Polish, by both Polish and non-Polish scholars, and especially of women's writing in history, is still in its infancy, despite the efforts of a few dedicated individuals. Relatively few scholarly monographs are published in Polish on individual women writers active before 1800, compared to the research published on their contemporaries writing in French, German, Spanish, Italian, English, and some other languages. We do know from the surveys by such scholars as Karolina Targosz in her Sawantki polskie XVII wieku (1997) and Piórem zakonnicy. Kronikarki w Polsce XVII w. o swoich zakonach i swoich czasach (2002), or Joanna Partyka in her "Żona wyćwiczona." Kobieta pisząca w kulturze XVI i XVII wieku (2004), that a large number of women were writing in Polish. For those who read Polish, the publication of collections of poetry by until recently forgotten poets, with scholarly introductions, are particularly useful because so infrequent, such as Krystyna Stasiewicz's 2003 edition of poetry by Elżbieta Drużbacka (1695–1765).

For the English-speaking or non-Polish reader, this rich treasure trove, along with the relatively little scholarship undertaken in relation to it, remains inaccessible, for translations into English of original works by Polish women writing before 1800 are more or less non-existent. This lacuna should be a matter of considerable concern, since the trend in Polish literary studies in recent years at British and North American universities has been away from reading texts in the original language and towards dependence on translations, even among so-called heritage speakers. Without translations, therefore, this literature remains invisible. One possibility for academic survival is the comparative context: if works written in lesser-known European languages are translated, they can be brought into wider comparative research programs on European literary and cultural history. Without the visibility provided by translations, these writers remain marginalized, as does the social and cultural milieu from which they hail. In the case of women writers active before 1800, that is, before the final partition of the Polish state in 1795 and the subsequent pressure on Polish nineteenth-century writers to focus on Polish patriotic issues and on the cultivation and survival of the national language, literary production was more obviously engaged with European writing, especially as most women writers came from the aristocracy and knew French as well as Polish. Some knew Latin, Italian, and, in a few cases, German or English. A fine example of such an aristocratic woman familiar with European literature is the protagonist of the volume under review: the playwright, translator, poet, and founder of the pioneering private theatre on her husband's estate at Nieśwież (in present-day Belarus, now Niasviž), Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (1705–53).

The appearance of a substantial volume containing not only a selection of Radziwiłłowa's plays—seven of the fourteen published posthumously in 1754—and poetry in English translation, but also a seventy-three-page introduction to them, is therefore to be welcomed. The Toronto series, "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe," is to be congratulated for bringing at least one lesser-known language and its literature into the wider European literary fold, as well as to the fold of scholarship on early women, in which a writer such as Radziwiłłowa now may actually be included. The author of the introduction, Barbara Judkowiak, is one of the exceptions to the dearth of scholars on individual women writers, having devoted herself to the study of Radziwiłłowa and having published articles on her from the mid-1980s to the present day. In 2013 she published, in Polish, a collection of Radziwiłłowa's works with substantial contextual and interpretative materials: Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa—w poszukiwaniu własnego głosu. Propozycje, dokumentacyjne i edytorskie. Before this, readers were...