To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

transformations in my thinking that make
my reading a small part of each project. In
each case, it seems to me, such reader
involvement has been a conscious and
deliberate part of the writer's process.
Writing on five French writers, for example,
Leah D. Hewitt has been scrupulously
careful about access for readers with
English-language limitations. She cites texts
that are readily available in English translations
and provides her own translations for
quotations when no other is accessible. She
is careful to explicate subtleties of meaning
when these depend on French syntax or
connotation. On a wider scale, her notes
are rich sources of annotated bibliography
and summaries of political and theoretical
discussions. With this courtesy-net in
place, she climbs her tightropes in examination
of modern and postmodern autobiographical
writings by five women who
work within contiguous and overlapping
contexts in a variety of genres, exploring
the specific difficulties of autobiography for
women and the problematic persistence of
the autobiographical subject. Hewitt
describes them as "working
through/against the genre of autobiography"
and looks carefully at the ways in
which each one provides "new possibilities
for imagining the genre and modern women's
relationship to it, as well as to writing
in general." Walking "the tightrope between
fiction and experience," she concludes,
"they consistently show that the gendered
subject continues to be an issue in the fictions
of identity.... Their negotiations with
the masculine/feminine dichotomy refuse
the authority of a masculine universal or an
essential feminine... .they open up autobiography
to the multiple affirmations, negations,
and displacements of the feminine
subject."
The feminine subject is central to Kadar's
work not only because she receives the
lioness' share of the text but also because
"she," is "a kind of feminized reading consciousness"
that impels the exploration of
"life writing" as a genre more variable,
democratic, and reader-inclusive than traditional
autobiography. "Life writing culminates
for me," Kadar writes, "in its
combination of feminism and narrative,
fictional or non-fictional, in what has come
to be known as l'écriture au féminin.... This
writing in the feminine IS life writing."
Given that autobiography theory has not
stood still long enough for any position to
assume hegemonic control, I have some
difficulty with Kadar's programmatic
approach to writing that has been "other."
What she has done, however, is powerful
and persuasive. This is a remarkable collection
of fine essays organized into a narrative
of exploration that incorporates the
literary and the accidental, the writer and
the reader as subjects, discussion of writing
strategies and of unexpected self-revelations.
Part One includes Alice van Wart on
Elizabeth Smart's early journals, Christl
Verduyn on Marian Engel's notebooks,
Helen M. Buss on Anna Jameson and the
sub-genre she identifies as "epistolary
dijournal," and Eleanor Ty with a valuable
piece on Wollstonecraft. Part Two contains
Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen
on court testimonies and Sally Cole on
anthropological lives, extending discussion
beyond the literary and the single subject.
Part Three considers fiction and autofiction
as life writing; Janice Williamson reads Elly
Danika's Don't, Marlene Kadar uses Gail
Scott's Spaces Like Stairs as explication for
her theoretical agenda, Nathalie Cooke
reads Cat's Eye as meta-life-writing, and
Ellen M. Anderson explores Don Quixote
"as one of the earliest and most complex
examples of fictional life writing" (173).
The collection then concludes with what
Kadar calls "two conventional scholarly
essays" by Evelyn J. Hinz and Shirley
Neuman that demonstrate the intellectual
exuberance with which theoreticians can
burst the bounds of what we may from
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