THE LANGUAGE OF
EXCLUSION: The Poetry of
Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti

Sharon Leder with Andrea Abbott. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Janice Lavery

Traditional literary criticism has often used stereotypical images of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti to explain their work and lives, in what the authors call the "spinster/recluse model." The "abnormal" Dickinson trapped by her self-imposed isolation, and Rossetti by her mystical spirituality, have provided the major focus for many examinations of their poetry. Leder and Abbott, claiming that the poets have been wrongly detached from the political issues and reform movements of their day, have aimed their study "beyond the current criticism by releasing the poets from the prison of their private selves and by demonstrating their poetic responses to public events in their age."

These responses, according to the authors, place the poets firmly within the historical development of the women's movement, particularly in the sense that women's writing - which embodied their voice - and their public actions were gathering critical power. Leder and Abbott explore the poets' lives and work to establish them as participants, through their work, in the events and great issues of their day. Dickinson, for example, was affected by the American Civil War, and Rossetti was active in social reform work during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

The poets' status as single women, in an age when "unmarried women of all classes were society's largest group of outsiders," is presented by the authors as among the most important keys to the poets' sense of exclusion and their resulting roles as clear-sighted observers of the society which had little room for them.

Rossetti's poetry was informed by the English women reformers and radicals who were focusing on marriage reform and women's exclusion from education, professional and economic opportunity. Dickinson commented critically on the American Civil War, religion and marriage. It has taken nearly one hundred years for Emily Dickinson and Christina Rosetti to be assessed in terms of their work and their experiences, rather than the degree of their conformity to or divergence from traditionally acceptable feminine behaviour. While their writing style could be smoother, Leder and Abbott have assembled a convincing case, utilizing biographical data, critical evaluation of the language and writing of Dickinson and Rossetti, and a survey of existing literary criticism and feminist theory of language. Extensive notes, indexes and a selected bibliography all add to the usefulness of the study.

People in the literacy field may be interested in approaching this book as a model for analyzing women's writing within a societal and historical context. Much of the strength of current literacy practice comes from its respect for and encouragement of the learner, her life and her experience. It is interesting to see this acceptance and respect applied to women in another context, and the historical perspective is a constructive addition to the learner-centered approach.

The examination of the lives of these women, who were educated and middle class (both stunning examples of literate power), may seem at first to be of limited relevance to the literacy movement It is, however, a useful reminder of the long struggle women have waged to find their own authentic voices and to have them heard. The move toward literacy is an important part of women's struggle to free themselves from involuntary exclusion and to enable all our voices to be heard.

PARADISE ON HOLD

Laura Bulger. Toronto: Bramble House, 1987.

Marie-France Silver

This arresting collection of short stories by Toronto author Laura Bulger created a considerable sensation within the Canadian Portuguese community when it first appeared in its original language. Now that it has been translated, it should attract a good deal of attention from English Canada.

These are tales of loneliness, in adaptation, and alienation. Bulger's characters are misfits - people caught between conflicting views of life, tom between the illusory world of their imagination and the drab reality of daily life, disenchanted by the present while tormented by nostalgic memories of their long gone youth. Many of them have immigrated to Canada from Portugal or Italy. Tom between the old world and the new, they are as estranged - psychologically and spiritually - from the former as from the latter. They remain outsiders, forever pulled in opposing directions. "What a helluva life!" exclaims the narrator of "Vaivém," the last story in the collection. "Always coming and going, from here to there, there to here, um vaivem ..."

In a classically sober style, Laura Bulger succeeds in dramatizing the peculiar ambivalence of all those who have left one country to settle in another.

CIVIL TO STRANGERS AND
OTHER WRITINGS

Barbara Pym. Edited by Hazel Holt. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988.

Anne Pilgrim

Not long before her death in 1980, Barbara Pym gave some thought to the proper disposition of her remains - her literary remains, that is, which were then occupying a large cardboard box in her bedroom. Eventually she gave all of her manuscripts, notebooks and papers to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, a most suitable (her favorite adjective) choice given the importance of Oxford in her life and her fiction. It is from that treasure trove of manuscripts that the present collection of some of her earliest work is drawn.

The appearance of Civil to Strangers brings to thirteen the total number of Pym novels, in a thirty-eight-year publishing history which falls into three sharply defined phases. First came the six gently satirical comedies, peopled with "excellent women" much put upon by vicars or anthropologists (or both). This sort of novel went out of style in the early 1960s, leaving Pym in an enforced silence that ended only in 1977 when both Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin singled her out in a TLS survey as an "under-rated" author; at the end of the decade she was able to place three more novels with Macmillan in rapid succession, including the much-praised Quartet in Autumn. Since her death her sister Hilary, her literary executor Hazel Holt and other friends such as Larkin have been active in editing the manuscript material, a project which has yielded the invaluable 1984 autobiography, A Very Private Eye. and four posthumous novels: An Unsuitable Attachment, Crampton Hodnet, An Academic Question, and now Civil to Strangers. To make up what she describes as "a last sheaf" of Pym's unpublished writings, Hazel Holt has added to the full text of Civil to Strangers sizeable extracts from three other novels, four short stories, and the script of a talk Pym gave on BBC Radio in 1978 after her rediscovery by the press and public.