Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Collaboration and Collusion: Two Victorian Writing Couples and Their Orientalist Texts

In a lengthy review article on “Lady Travellers” published in the Quarterly Review in 1845, Elizabeth Rigby (later Lady Eastlake) made the following bold claim for the distinctiveness of women’s travel writing and the special gendered knowledge it could communicate: “Every country . . . to be fairly understood, requires reporters from both sexes. Not that it is precisely recommended that all travellers should hunt the world in couples and give forth their impressions in the double columns of holy wedlock; but that kind of partnership should be tacitly formed between books of travel which, properly understood, we should have imagined to have been the chief aim of matrimony—namely, to supply each other’s deficiencies, and correct each other’s errors, purely for the good of the public.”1 Redressing each other’s deficiencies and correcting each other’s errors is a happy vision of complementarity that Rigby wittily applies both to the aims of marriage and the relations of travel book writers. Her slightly bemused approach to the subject is suggested by the characterization of matrimony as a system of checks and balances that exists “purely” to benefit society as a whole. Rigby then applies this inflated rhetoric of separate spheres to travel literature, where 175 Collaboration and Collusion Two Victorian Writing Couples and Their Orientalist Texts   books by men and women should be issued in partnership with each other, each redressing the other’s shortcomings for the public good. At first glance such tidy complementarity would appear to characterize the cases of the writing couples I examine in this essay. Sophia Poole’s The Englishwoman in Egypt is a “humble helpmate” to her brother’s scholarly, orientalist work The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Similarly, Isabel Burton’s “Household Edition” of her husband’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night offered the Victorian public a version of his translations that could be introduced with propriety into the respectable home and was guaranteed never to bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek.2 Although the rhetoric of gendered complementarity structures and validates the collaborative projects, such rhetoric often masks a more complex division of labor and mixture of motives than the doctrine of separate spheres admits. In some senses collaboration is also collusion: Sophia Poole writes letters to a friend, but the recipient is imaginary and much of the content of her special woman’s perspective derives from her brother’s notes. Isabel and Richard Burton collude in the fiction that Isabel has never read the improper material excised from her special women’s edition of The Arabian Nights. But even in the act of collusion these women writers also assert their individuality and authority. In both writing couples questions of authority over form and content arise, power struggles over representations of the East surface, and surprising contradictions in the attribution of “masculine” and “feminine” knowledge spring up. Though both Sophia Poole and Isabel Burton disclaim a position of dominance in relation to the texts of their male counterparts, their subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) revisions of those prior texts reveal a resistance to simply serving the brother’s or husband’s greater knowledge and an insistence on their own ways of knowing and truth telling. The texts they produce are sites of struggle and competition even as they pay lip service to the superiority of male “scientific” orientalism and appear to accept the secondary role of impressionistic “female” knowledge shaped by domestic concerns. Sophia Poole is writing for her brother, but also—quietly and implicitly at times—writing back to him. Isabel Burton, conversely, can be said to be “underwriting” her husband in the sense that she writes both to protect his copyright and guarantee his reputation as the finest of orientalists, as well as to censor his translations for a respectable female audience. In this essay I will show how, by means of the collaborative opportunity offered them, writers such as Isabel Burton and Sophia Poole adjudicated 176   the sometimes-competing claims of gendered authorship, personal relationship , feminine propriety, and national superiority. Lane and Poole in Egypt On his third trip to Egypt the well-known Egyptologist Edward William Lane was accompanied by his sister and her two young sons, who lived with him in Cairo for a number of years. As Sophia Poole explains in the course of The Englishwoman in Egypt, her purpose in traveling to Egypt was...