Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views ed. by Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino (review)

Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino set themselves an ambitious task with a well-deserved topic—Lydia Sigourney. The organization in two parts, "Sigourney's Work" and "The Work of Sigourney," is fitting for her career and life. Comprehensive of her extensive output and exploring such diverse aspects as Sigourney's poetics, rhetoric, and generic innovation before turning to "unpack her participation in the cultural movements of her day" (3), this edited volume outlines the range of Sigourney's work and the contributions made during her time. Throughout, the authors repeatedly and credibly defend Sigourney's right to be included in the canon and in classes for serious academic investigation. Nina Baym and her foundational article "Reinventing Lydia Sigourney" reappears throughout the chapters in her rightful place as the hero of Sigourney studies. Key villains also emerge in the form of Gordon S. Haight, the patronizing biographer, and Charles Sigourney, the disgruntled husband. Still another pattern is the need for many forms of "re" as we move beyond recovery to reinvent, recuperate, recalculate, reassess, reveal, and reimagine Sigourney and her contributions.

There are two innovative approaches in the collection that are worth note. First, the format of conversation and collaboration among the authors allows for further extension of the arguments made across chapters. At times this conversational approach is confusing, particularly when authors refer to arguments in chapters organized later in the volume, but these confusions are quickly resolved. Second, the inclusion of a chapter with a response from a poetess adds weight to the arguments of Sigourney's importance to audiences and authors of her time as well as those today. The final picture of Sigourney that emerges moves far beyond recovery to deep academic and practical consideration and makes this collection more than the sum of its parts.

A key contribution is the complete repudiation of the negative responses and reviews Sigourney's work received from the early critics and scholars to address her work. She was the reigning American woman author in her time and while she suffered from the shift in tastes toward the end of her career, she dominated many genres in early American literature. That she was so quickly dismissed upon her death is a shame and the thorough research explaining why this decline occurred illustrates this persuasively. In chapter 1, "Lydia Sigourney, from Reinvention to Reconsideration," Kete and Petrino provide a thorough review of her life and the reception of her work at the time. There are interesting insights into why her reputation began to degrade toward the end of her life and how that contributed to the horrid reception of her work by early scholars and critics. This chapter avoids the traps of much female biography in focusing too much on the domestic situation to the exclusion of the broader context and interaction of the domestic sphere with the public sphere. In the end, the authors clearly demonstrate how much Sigourney dominated her public life.

Continuing this line of careful consideration of the pitfalls for women authors, in chapter 2, "Remodeling the Kitchen in Parnassus: Sigourney's Poetics of Collaboration," Jennifer Putzi identifies and illustrates key themes from Sigourney's life that plagued many nineteenth-century female authors—maintaining a respectable and respected position while acting in the public sphere. A thorough setup of the extent to which her work was dismissed by scholars, critics, and herself justifies a reevaluation of her early poetry. The extensive archival finds support a solid tracking of the collaborative process Sigourney leveraged in the early days of her working life.

Shifting from Sigourney's position as a woman writer, chapter 3, "A Sense of the Material Object: Sigourney's Fabric Poems," provides a deep look into the qualities of her work. Joan R. Wry's in-depth focus on specific pieces of Sigourney's work, including "To a Fragment of Silk" (1833), "To a Shred...