Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives ed. by Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, Anne McWhir (review)

Works Cited Brown, E. K. On Canadian Poetry. 1943. Rev. Ed. 1944. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973Frye , Northrop. “Canada and Its Poetry (1943)” Rev. of The Book of Cana­ dian Poetry, ed. A. J.M. Smith. The Making ofModern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English. Eds. Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski. Toronto: Ryerson, 1967. Lemire, Maurice, et al. La Vie Littéraire au Québec. Sainte-Foy, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991-. Lipking, Lawrence. “A Trout in the Milk.” The Uses ofLiterary History. Ed. Marshall Brown. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. New, W. H. A History of Canadian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1989. White, Hayden. “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Helen M . Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir, eds. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Waterloo: W ilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001. 340 pp. $49.95" cloth. This collection of essays on the lives and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is an achievement for which the editors, the press, and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities— sponsor of the conference that gave rise to the project— should be congratulated. Books based on confer­ ence papers often disappoint, but the present volume offers much of value not only to Shelley and Wollstonecraft specialists but also to two much larger constituencies: those engaged with feminist thought and praxis, and students of life writing in all its forms. The conference was held to mark the bicentenary of the daughter’s birth and the mother’s death: the mother, author of a radical critique of the way society infantilized women, stifling their intellects; the daughter, later to become author of a narrative that fatally parodied the male drive to monopolize creation and procreation. This collection does not confine itself to these well-known works, however. What gives it still wider scope is the contributors’ awareness of how the post-revolution debate politicized Book Reviews | 165 This collection of essays on the lives and writ­ ings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is an achievement for which the edi­ tors, the press, and the Calgary Institute for the Humanities ... should be con­ gratulated. textual production, domestic life, and gender roles— or rather, how the already-political nature of these things became matter for unprecedented controversy. Conservative anxiety is typified by a writer mentioned but not quoted in the volume under review, Jane West: One of the misfortunes under which literature now labours is, that the title of a work no longer announces its intention: books of travel are converted into vehicles of politics and sys­ tems of legislation. Female letter-writers teach us the arcana of government.... Writers on morality lay the axe to the root of domestic harmony ... the novel ... is converted into an offensive weapon. (3: 387-8) The transgressive coupling of genres stands for all ways in which the times were politically out of joint. It is against this background that we can understand the startling claim made in Gary Kelly’s wide-ranging essay: “the dominant discursive mode of the Revolution debate was autobiographical” (21). Even those who abhorred Rousseau’s politics found themselves deploying the “subjec­ tive ... sublime” (21), Kelly argues, but Wollstonecraft and Shelley were revolutionary in that they fused the personal and the political, using each to critique the other. Kelly also points out the ironies generated by the mother’s ambivalent legacy to her daughter. In Shelley, he suggests, we see the first symptoms of a crisis in the writer’s role, as the modern subject was “purged” of “revolutionary excess,” and made into the supposedly autono­ mous subject demanded by bourgeois liberalism (22). The writer’s life can become an end in itself, an aestheticized, politically ineffective refuge from bourgeois ennui. For Kelly, Mary Shelley’s fiction commits the sin of proto-liberalism (22)— a verdict that later contributors to this volume (particularly Lisa Vargo and Jeanne Moskal) challenge and complicate. Nearly all the essays devoted to Wollstonecraft take up the question of genre, particularly how genre “mediates,” as Lawrence Kennard puts it, “the relationship between self and world” (56). Eleanor Ty links the peculiarly...