Villette by Charlotte Brontë, and : The Poems of Charlotte Brontë by Charlotte Brontë (review)

of Coleridge's annotation, and should have been confined to the textual note. From the facing facsimile, however, I guess that' Sic cine' is in Coleridge's hand, in which case the textual note is in error. In either case, its repetition seems unnecessary. On P 533, Coleridge's note to p 8 is incompletely printed, at least in my copy; it should continue, after 'Das am': 'meistens sich kombinirende, seems the more appropriate epithet.' Whalley's footnote 1 refers to the missing German phrase. There is some inconsistency in the notification of Coleridge's miswritings which might be taken as misprints. Though editorial practice is that 'obvious misspellings are reproduced without comment' (p xxi), many are recorded in the textual notes in the form'A slip for ...' (they are usually common graphic errors in English, or misspellings of German, Greek, or Latin words); others of the same kind are not noted, e.g., p 227, 'Engline' for 'Engine' (quoted, with correct spelling, on p 16, commentary); p 857, 'singliar' (correctly transcribed from the source) for 'singular.' On the other hand, 'accidental repetitions are also reproduced normally with explanation in a textual note': of these I find only three (pp 636, 1036, 108,), while elsewhere we have repetitions without comment: pp 3'7, 5471582,1122, 1176: ~to to,' 'as as,' 'in in,' 'he he,' 'than than'; of these, the first two are, to my knowledge, correctly transcribed; the others have been out of reach for checking. None of these entirely minor blemishes will diminish the usefulness or the major editorial achievement of this massive and handsome volume. (W.J.B. OWEN) Charlotte Bronte. Villette. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith Clarendon Press 1984. 768. $119.95 Charlotte Bronte. The Poems ofCharlotte Bronti!. Edited by Victor A. Neufeldt Garland English Texts 9. Garland. 497. $65.00 The fourth volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontes has recently been published. Like the edition of Shirley (1979), Villette has been prepared by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith, who are continuing their collaboration in an edition of Charlotte Bronte's firstwritten though last-published novel, The Professor, for this same series. Rosengarten, of the University of British Columbia, is one of two West Coast scholars who have of late been working to establish reliable texts of works byCharlotte Bronte. The other, Victor Neufeldtof the University of Victoria, has brought out an edition of Bronte's poems, hard on the heels of Tom Winnifrith's 1984 edition ofthe Poems for the Shakespeare Head. The edition of Villette and Neufeldt's edition of Charlotte Bronte's Poems have been funded in part by grants of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. HUMANITIES 107 The SSHRC grant appears to have had little effect on the price in Canada of the Clarendon Villette. At $119.95, it suggests a new era, ofcoffee-table scholarship. Its list oferrata (twenty-fivein number, notincludingacomma which mistakenly replaces a period on p 215, line 14) has been discreetly located after the notes and before the appendices, presumably so as not to distract the reader. The blurred print on p 197 provides a nice surprise for those who do more than thumb pages, and the failure to include a period after the title on what appears to be (although clearly is not) a reproduction of the title page of volume I of the first edition raises the interesting possibility that Oxford has chosen to playas cunningly and as evasively with bibliographical as Lucy Snowe does with biographical matters. In establishing their text the editors havehad available to them the fair copy of the manuscript of Villette as well as an 'advance' copy of the first edition (in paper covers) which belonged to Charlotte's widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and which appears to have been corrected and even revised by the author herself. They have also consulted a copy of Villette in the Sterling Library, University of London, which consists of a mixture of first-edition and proof pages. The corrections and revisions of these proofs are not in Charlotte Bronte's hand and in certain cases represent what Margaret Smith in her textual introduction terms...