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PARADISE on HOLD Marie-France Silver CIVIL to STRANGERS AND

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PARADISE on HOLD Marie-France Silver CIVIL to STRANGERS AND women's writing - which embodied professional and economic opportunity. model for analyzing women's writing their voice - and their public actions Dickinson commented critically on the within a societal and historical context. were gathering critical power. Leder and American Civil War, religion and mar- Much of the strength of current literacy Abbott explore the poets' lives and work riage. practice comes from its respect for and to establish them as participants, through It has taken nearly one hundred years encouragement of the learner, her life and their work, in the events and great issues for Emily Dickinson and Christina Ros- her experience. It is interesting to see this of their day. Dickinson, for example, was setti to be assessed in terms of their work acceptance and respect applied to women affected by the American Civil War, and and their experiences, rather than the in another context, and the historical per- Rossetti was active in social reform work degree of their conformity to or diver- spective is a constructive addition to the during the middle decades of the nine- gence from traditionally acceptable femi- learner-centered approach. teenth century. nine behaviour. The examination of the lives of these Thepoets' status as single women, in an While their writing style could be women, who were educated and middle age when "unmarried women of all smoother, Leder and Abbott have as- class (both stunning examples of literate classes were society's largest group of sembled a convincing case, utilizing bi- power), may seem at first to be of limited outsiders," is presented by the authors as ographical data, critical evaluation of the relevance to the literacy movement. It is, among the most important keys to the language and writing of Dickinson and however, a useful reminder of the long poets' sense of exclusion and their result- Rossetti, and a survey of existing literary struggle women have waged to find their ing roles as clear-sighted observers of the criticism and feminist theory of language. own authentic voices and to have them society which had little room for them. Extensive notes, indexes and a selected heard. The move toward literacy is an Rossetti's poetry was informed by the bibliography all add to the usefulness of important part of women's struggle to English women reformers and radicals the study. free themselves from involuntary exclu- who were focusing on marriage reform People in the literacy field may be in- sion and to enable all our voices to be and women's exclusion from education, terested in approaching this book as a heard, pp PARADISE ON HOLD that it has been mnslated, it shouldattract old world and the new, they are as es- a good deal of attention from English tranged - psychologically and spiritu- Canada. ally -from the former as from the latter. Laura Bulger. Toronto: Bramble House, These are tales of loneliness, inadapta- They remain dutsiders, forever pulled in 1987. tion, and alienation. Bulger's characters opposing directions. "What a helluva are misfits - people caught between life!" exclaims the narrator of "VaivCm," Marie-France Silver conflicting views of life, tom between the the last story in the collection. "Always illusory world of their imagination and coming and going, from here to there, This arresting collection of short stories the drab reality of daily life, disenchanted there to here, um vaivCm .. ." by Toronto author Laura Bulger created a by the present while tormented by nos- In a classically sober style, Laura Bul- considerable sensation within the Cana- talgic memories of their long-gone youth. ger succeeds in dramatizing the peculiar dian Portuguese community when it first Many of them have immigrated to Canada ambivalence of all those who have left appeared in its original language. Now from Portugal or Italy. Tom between the one country to settle in another. CIVIL TO STRANGERS AND the importance of Oxford in her life and in rapid succession, including the much- OTHER WRITINGS her fiction. Itis from that treasure trove of praised Quartet in Autumn. Since her manuscripts that the present collection of death her sister Hilary, her literary execu- some of her earliest work is drawn. tor Hazel Holt and other friends such as Barbara Pym. Edited by Hazel Holt. The appearance of Civil to Strangers Larkin have been active in editing the Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, manuscript material, a project which has 1988. brings to thirteen the total number of Pym novels, in a thirty-eight-year publishing yielded the invaluable 1984 autobiogra- history which falls into three sharply phy, A Very Private Eye, and four posthu- Anne Pilgrim defined phases. First came the six gently mous novels: An UnsuitableAttachment, satirical comedies, peopled with "excel- Crampton Hodnet, An Academic Not long before her death in 1980, lent women" much put upon by vicars or Question, and now Civil to Strangers. To Barbara Pym gave some thought to the anthropologists (or both). This sort of make up what she describes as "a last proper disposition of her remains - her novel went out of style in theearly 1960s, sheaf' of Pym's unpublished writings, literary remains, that is, which were then leaving Pyrn in an enforced silence that Hazel Holt has added to the full text of occupying a large cardboard box in her ended only in 1977 when both Lord David Civil to Strangers sizeable extracts from bedroom. Eventually she gave all of her Cecil and Philip Larkin singled her out in three other novels, four short stories, and manuscripts, notebooks and papers to the a TLS survey as an "under-rated" author; the script of a talk Pym gave on BBC Bodleian Library in Oxford, a most suit- at the end of the decade she was able to Radio in 1978 after her rediscovery by the able (her favorite adjective) choice given place three more novels with Macmillan press and public. 142 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESlLES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME .
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