To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
"Theory: Beauty or Monster," Smaro
Kamboureli shows how attitudes to theory
have divided Canadian women writers and
critics. In "The Bodies of the Texts in Lives
of Girls and Women: Del Jordan's Reading,"
Neil Besner uses postmodern and feminist
theory not to exclude the non-specialist,
but to add to the enjoyment of the text for
the general reader.
Besner is also the author of Introducing
Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, a
reader's guide that will appeal to high
school and university English teachers and
their students. I hope that this book will
also be discovered by readers of Canadian
literature outside the universities. Although
some women, myself included, may feel a
pang that ECW assigned a male critic to a
text that women cherish because it
inscribes their own stories, Besner's fair,
thorough, and gracefully written survey of
the critical methods that have been applied
to Lives of Girls and Women quickly reassured
me.
He follows the series' excellent format,
which includes a chronology, the importance
of the work, a review of its critical
reception and a comprehensive ten-part
analysis of the text, as well as an annotated
bibliography and index. Whereas earlier
examples in this series ran to about 75
pages, Besner expands to 121 pages, owing
partly to the extensive bibliography. ECW
deserves thanks for adding the extra text
and several revealing photographs of
Munro's manuscripts in the Special
Collections Division of the University of
Calgary. A page from her notebook, headed
"Burglars," reveals Munro's round, closelyspaced,
slightly back-slanted handwriting
covering the entire page. Only one word is
blacked out. Another page shows three different
versions of a single paragraph in the
draft of the beginning of "Princess Ida."
In his critical analysis, Besner emphasizes
the importance of the short story form for
Alice Munro and Canadian fiction as a
whole, and discusses the question of
whether Lives of Girls and Women is a novel
or a short story cycle. More importantly, he
shows how the first story, "Princess Ida,"
became the nucleus for the entire work,
and how Del discards her Mother's view of
the world, but learns from her how "stories
conjure and reshape the past." While
Besner does full justice to the structure of
the text, most readers will probably consult
him for guidance on interpretation. They
will find him particularly helpful about
"Epilogue: The Photographer," the concluding
segment that gave Munro considerable
trouble and continues to trouble her
readers.
Introducing Alice Munro's Lives of Girls
and Women distils the commentary of a
generation of critics on a single text, exemplifying
Besner's contention that Canadian
criticism is moving away from surveys
toward a focus on individual writers and
texts. Nevertheless, there will always be a
place for a book like Multiple Voices that
brings together writers and scholars to discuss
the relationship between culture, voice
and literature.
Surfaces
Richard Teleky
Goodnight, Sweetheart and Other Stories.
Cormorant $12.95
J. Jill Robinson
Lovely in Her Bones. Arsenal Pulp Press $12.95
Reviewed by Susanne Goodison
Richard Teleky in Goodnight, Sweetheart
and Other Stories and J. Jill Robinson in
Lovely in Her Bones explore a myriad of
connections between friends, family members,
and lovers. The ways relationships are
adjusted to suit people's lives and why,
despite those adjustments, they break, fascinate
both authors.
Teleky's collection ranges across very different
situations and seemingly different
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