Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin ed. by Diane Warren and Laura Peters (review)

Rereading Orphanhood adeptly surveys a wide range of canonical and non-canonical orphan figures in the nineteenth-century novel from European and North American authors. The contributors deal with recognizable orphans such as Oliver Twist, Anne Shirley, and Sara Crewe, as well as lesser-known orphans such as Oswald Bastable. As a collection, Rereading Orphanhood is an effective introduction into the ways that families are socially constructed and the significant place that orphans held in the cultivation of Victorian society and ideals. The collection enters a relevant and extensive conversation about family and identity, paying particular attention to the liminal spaces constructed by and for "the other," and offers an engaging, fresh look at how the orphan challenges conventional ideas of culture, law, class, gender, and genre. The collection serves as a bridge between critical discussions of kinship, marriage, and family, such as those initiated by Laura Peters, Talia Schaffer, Kelly Hager, and Rachel Bowlby. It works as a complementary resource to those conversations and others like them for generating a fully developed portrait of the Victorian family.

As a whole, the contributors attempt to define the orphan's status, arguing that the orphan figure outlines kinship and caregiving in literature and in reality; the figure "challenges and amends the family," creating space for new kinds of familial bonds (269). Claudia Nelson and Cheryl L. Nixon address the question of status through financial and legal discourse. Nelson examines the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Philip Pullman, discussing the ways that kinship bonds revolve around finances, and in turn, comment on the larger cultural construct of value. Nixon also writes of financial bonds, explaining the transformation of Victorian notions of guardianship as the "legal recognition of the need to protect the child's emotional welfare—not just physical and economic welfare—within family structure" (10). In perhaps one of the most engaging chapters of the collection, Nixon outlines the Chancery proceedings of Seymour v. Euston, a case involving Prince Regent (later King George IV), his illegal wife Maria Fitzherbert, and her claims to the custody of an orphaned girl named Mary Georgiana Emma Seymour. Here, Nixon compares the court case with Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, arguing that the narrative and the legal proceedings emphasize the necessity of a careful consideration of the best interests of the child in determining guardianship (as opposed to wills or financial situations) and, thus, in creating a family.

These elective kinship bonds are explored by Kelly Hager, Tamara S. Wagner, and Diane Warren. In establishing the myriad of ways that orphans were pivotal in establishing familial connections, these contributors observe the notions of origin and identity perpetuated in the narratives. For example, Kelly Hager offers a fascinating description of adoptive reading—a term coined by Andrew Stauffer—as one way that orphan figures interact with their worlds and cultivate families for themselves. According to Hager, adoptive reading is what readers do when "they respond to what they read as if it has reference to and relevance for them, as if it's something to be engaged with directly, something they can use and apply to and in their own lives" (81). Here, Hager argues that more critical attention should be paid to reading practices because they are instrumental in cultivating our identities. She demonstrates the significance of adoptive reading as a coping strategy through a close analysis of E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess, and L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. While Hager discusses the cultivation of reading practices, Wagner outlines the cultivation of the orphan genre. She argues that "Victorian orphan narratives combine the structures of the traditional foundling tale with social criticism. Throughout the century, the mystery of an orphan's origins remains an important driving force in fiction. However, it retains its thematic significance precisely by becoming redefined through a self-reflexive engagement with narrative structure itself" (57). Wagner suggests that with the...